Avatar Blog

The part of this reading that stuck with me the most is the creativity that avatars give people along with the freedom they give someone to escape the real world. The first example of Jason Rowe, who has many physical disabilities, used his avatar to fit in as a normal person and not be judged based on his physical ailments. I think this is really cool because none of his friends online know that he has any sort of problem because he interacts on the internet just like everyone else. On the outside, Jason seems like a weaker person because of his disabilities, but when playing online with his avatar, he looks just like everyone else and does not have to worry about being any less capable than anyone else.

In the instance of Rebecca Glasure, avatars are very useful to gaining respect in the gaming world. When playing as a female character, nobody gave her complete respect for the player she was simply because they assumed she was a girl and could not game to as high a level as a boy. However, when changing her character to a man, she immediately gained more respect. I think this is very interesting and makes avatars very useful because it can completely eliminate sexism online when used correctly.

I think the example of Cassien Guier from France was very interesting because he was very concerned with making his girl avatar look as fabulous as possible. If he did this to himself in real life, he would most definitely be ridiculed and judged by everyone that met him. However, the use of an avatar allows him to express his inner desires of dressing up in pink and changing his hair styles without actually doing it to his body. This freedom to express one’s own inner feelings is one of the best reasons to use an avatar because other online users do not see the person behind the avatar. All they see is the pixels on the screen. There is no judging the personality of the creator that decided to form the avatar the way they did.

Within the classroom I think that avatars can be used to show the true personality of a person. People are often afraid to voice their opinions, especially when they are at risk of being judged by their peers. For this reason, avatars in the classroom could allow students to create a persona of themselves that they feel properly reflect their personality instead of what other students might gather from what the student does or says or wears.

This concept of using avatars in classrooms could be especially useful in online classes because then the professors and students would really have no idea what each other looked like and would therefore be unable to pass judgment simply on physical appearance. They would only be able to form opinions based on the avatars used to create a self-portrait and the work presented by each student.

Paper Topic Strategies

The main idea that I got from reading these few pages was to start papers early. Procrastination is your worst enemy if you want to be able to use these writing tools mentioned in the passages. I think a lot of them have some good value associated with them. Especially if the problem being faced is writer’s block. I often suffer from that when starting a paper and wrapping a paper up. For this, I think that being able to write down your thoughts and say your thoughts aloud is good for brainstorming and coming up with every piece of information you can possibly think of that might relate to the topic even just a little bit. It helps a lot to do this because it allows for people to not focus on one specific subject but instead many different areas that relate to a large topic. This can be especially helpful in finding the best topic to write about. After taking breaks and going back to look at what you have already written, some of the things may sound completely absurd and can be crossed off the list of things to be written. Others that may have not seemed that important initially might become incredibly useful after being looked at a second time.

            This advice given by the book such as Googling a topic or reading the paper about a topic can be very helpful to finding a topic that actually has some significance to it. The more significant a topic is, the more there is to write about the topic. I think that doing things such as this are very helpful because they allow for the writer to find something relevant to current events, which will appeal to a much broader audience.

            All of these skilled that were advised of people are definitely helpful but they are completely useless if you wait until the last night before a paper is due. Taking five minutes to brainstorm about ideas is the last thing I want to do when I am writing a paper due in a few hours. Reading a newspaper to find a current event is also something that seems like more of a waste of time than anything when you are in a time crunch. However, if you have plenty of time to spare, these methods are definitely the best for finding a topic that you have a lot to write about and can appeal to a vast audience. It is when you take the time to plan the topic that the paper turns out the best opposed to other times when you pick a topic in ten seconds because it was the first thing you could think of and you need to start writing as soon as possible.

Writing of the Cartoon Analysis

My initial thoughts about writing this paper were that it was going to be challenging to do with 1,500 words. However, once I started writing the paper and got my thoughts flowing onto the paper I definitely realized that it was not going to be hard to complete the paper. The part that helped the most was that I was writing on a topic that I actually found pretty interesting. It also helped that the cartoon I was writing on was interesting to me and not that difficult to analyze. I found a few different aspects of it to talk about that were included in the analysis. Some of these included the comparison between China and Great Britain as world powers and the contrast between the different colors used in the separate frames depicting each country.

            My work in English class last year was helpful for writing this paper because we spent a lot of time analyzing texts and pictures in IB English last year. This definitely pointed me in the right direction for finding comparisons between colors and body language of the characters as well as the deeper meaning for what they may be used for. With things like this to talk about I had no problem thoroughly completing my thoughts on this paper while completing the word limit requirements.

            I also found the sample analysis in the book very helpful for formatting my paper. It was especially helpful for citing the cartoon at the end and coming up with a title for the paper; even though my title might too closely resemble the sample. However this was definitely a helpful resource for me to use and I think it helped me to do a good job completing this rough draft. Hopefully my partner thinks so as well.

Susie Orbach Article

I think that this article by Susie Orbach is extremely relevant to the society that we live in today. I have two sisters so I know fully well how much time girls spend making sure that they match the depiction of the ideal girl that society has created. I’ve seen my sisters paint their nails four or five times in one day just because the first few coats didn’t match their standards. I think that even small things like this go to show that girls often times are far too concerned with making themselves look like a model instead of looking like themselves.

This goal that many girls try to accomplish has created a serious problem in our society. A part of the article I found particularly shocking is that 1 in every 4 college girls have eating problems. This number is surprisingly high because it is something that you would never expect out of a large number of people just from looking at them or talking to them. There is a small group of girls that look unhealthily skinny that you make assumptions that they have eating problems, but that definitely does not account for the 25% of all girls. That means that many more girls have the same problems on a smaller scale and it goes unnoticed every day. This should be a great concern for our society because nutrition is one of the major things that keeps us alive and functioning properly. If eating problems in girls can’t necessarily be identified obviously and still occur on a frequent basis then that is a very serious problem.

It seems that one of the main causes of this eating problem in girls comes from the advertisements put out by companies. Nearly all fashion companies that have advertisements use the same models for all of their ads. Tall and thin. This creates a false reality that everyone needs to look like this, when in fact, only a tiny percentage of girls can actually look like this. It creates a false sense of reality that many girls try way too hard to reach and end up hurting themselves.

I think that Dove’s advertising campaign to work on self-esteem is excellent for women around the world. I don’t think a good technique would be to encourage women to not wear makeup or no longer care about grooming themselves. However, I do think that these tactics should be encouraged to be used to accent the positive qualities that someone already possesses and not to create new qualities to conform to what society has created as beauty. I think Orbach did a great job of explaining all of these points in her article, and although I am by no means a feminist, I do think this is a very important issue that needs to be addressed for the sake of the young women and girls of our country.

A Snapshot History of America Response

This passage written by Michael Williams and friends was definitely an interesting one. I think their might have been a typo on one of the pages that said the Kodak camera was first available in 1988. I think it may have been 1888. But I’m not sure about that. I liked how there was a history of the snapshot and where that term came from. I also thought that the breakdown of where American film came from and an explanation of how cameras become easier to use and more accessible to the American public.

                One of the parts of this passage I enjoyed the most was the portion quoting Dorothy Fields about the meaningfulness of the snapshot. I liked it because she about the simplicity of her mother using a Kodak camera to take family pictures and how cameras now are too complicated. I can relate to this because I don’t take a lot of pictures. I have a camera but there are so many settings on the camera to adjust the lighting or lens or flash or plenty of other things about photography that I don’t even understand. I feel like I would have fit in better in the world of photography when the Kodak camera was the preferred method of recording memories and nobody had digital cameras. It just seems like a simpler time where you take out your Kodak and click once. After that one click, then you have a picture. No need to worry about focusing or turning the flash on.

                One other reason I like the idea of using the Kodak compared to digital cameras is because of the surprises that you could always receive after taking pictures on a Kodak. With a digital camera you can take a thousand pictures and immediately know what all of them look like and simply delete them on your camera if you don’t like them. However, with the Kodak, the camera has to be sent somewhere else to get the film developed. This, I think, is cool because you have no idea what your pictures are going to look like before they come back in an envelope. Whether they were good pictures or not, you’re stuck with them being developed. I think this is a feature of photography that I will miss as technology grows because it gives you more appreciation for taking good pictures when you come across the perfect picture from your developed film that you don’t even remember taking. It can make the memories more lasting and even more meaningful. And the bad pictures can be fun to laugh at.

                Even as technology continues to grow, the average Americans will definitely continue to be the backbone of the photography world. The amateur photographers are the ones taking pictures with their friends that create lasting memories that will be passed down to their children and on. I think this is a cool thought and was something I enjoyed reading about in this chapter.