Research Paper Continued...

Ok, so my final thesis took awhile to perfect. I have finally gotten it down to ...

"By turning political debates and coverage of elections into a makeshift reality television show, today's media has turned politics into just another form of enterainment."

Hopefully it will be a good paper. I need to discussing the effect television has on elections by showing how it has turn politicians into celebrities. Also I will discuss how the line between the entertainment industry and government has been blurred because of celebrities turning into politicians and celebrities becoming more envolved in the political process. My main source will be a book by Liesbet van Zoonen call "Entertaining the Citizen". It mainly focuses on the transformation of politics into another branch of the entertainment industry and how politics need to be entertaining in order for the people to participate. I am using mainly books on similar topics and a journel article on the effect that celebrity endorments have on a candidates campaign. I have learned so far in my research that more celebrity endorsments end up hurting the politicain than helpinig because people think that the politicians beleifs are the same as the celebrity that is endorsing them. I hope this paper turns out alright and I don't mess it up too badly! haha

Research Paper

I not entirely sure if we are suppose to write the two paragraphs for this blog since the directions weren't really specific. I guess I'll just write two anyways. I personally was really excited that we spent an entire class period watching someone play world of warcraft (still do not understand how anyone could figure out how everything works). Who knew that a person could spend a half a year playing one game? It's amazing! I still have a very important question though... why did the octopus on the staff only have four legs? I thought octopus were suppose to have eight legs.

My research topic is going to be how stars use their popularity to try and raise interest in politics and global causes, or the general lack of interest our generation seems to express towards, well, everything. My thesis's (that might be the plural spelling, I have no idea) are possibly going to be...

1. The use of celebrity influence has caused greater social awareness leading to the ultimate bettering of the world. (I'm not quite sure of the wording)

2. The seeming apathy the current generation has towards politics and global issues mainly stream from the media's influence over young people and the way the media portrays today's youth.

Taking Charge of Assignments and Rants

The take-charge assignment seems interesting and very easy to understand. What’s not easy to understand is quantitative chemistry. I have no idea what is going on in that class, but don’t worry because this actually has something to do with English. Most of the kids in English class are chemical engineers so they also have to take quantitative chemistry. So basically if you are reading one of the blogs and think it makes no sense whatsoever, it might be because quantitative chemistry has turned our brains to mush, which brings me to my next topic: media.
I have never been in an English class where we have not read at least one novel in the first three weeks, much less an English class where we get to pick the topic we study. Given the choice, I think I would rather have someone else decide what I learn just because it would be less work for me, but because we do have the choice I think I might want to do something about global warming. We could take conflicting arguments and tear their structure apart, and then we can decided which argument is valid and which one is not finally ending the debate on global warming. Perhaps after we finish with global warming, we could move on to other topics such as the Middle East conflict and finally create peace through our validation of arguments. By the end of the discussion we could be Noble Peace Prize winners. That may be setting our sights too high for a semester English class, but we can at least closely examine the arguments behind global warming and continue from there.

Trust in the Age of Diversity and Spin: Analyzed

So basically the only reason I read this article is because it was required for class. It was more interesting than the first article we read in class, but it was boring none the less. I did think that it was a little ironic that the author was writing about how people distrust the media, and he is the media. He was writing about distrusting himself. haha
There was one major fallacy in Michale Hedges article; he states that people do not trust media when it is owned by the government, but he continues to argue that people distrust the media because they are independent corporations. It is true that people disbelieve the media when it is run by the government, because they know that the government will only allow the people to know what the government wants them to know. However, it is not true that people distrust corporate media; people simply listen to what they want to hear, and the companies have realized just that. News is no longer about telling the truth. News is about making money. The companies know that they won't make a profit if the people won't read or listen to a story. They do not withhold information to keep the public ignorant; they simply inform the public of what they want to hear. In an ideal society, the news might contain what is important and the people would read, but our society is not perfect so neither is the media.

Does this thing work?

Well basically im just writing this to see if the site is working. Its not very intersting nor is there any necessity in reading it.