Interview Comparison

These two interviews were very different in formatting. The first interview was somewhat confusing to follow because there weren’t any questions being asked by an interviewer, but instead it was more of a group of statements from different individuals. It could be considered an interview version of a collage in a way. The second interview definitely represented a traditional interview with the proper format of questions being asked in italics and being clearly answered underneath the question. The format of the second interview about McDonald’s is also much more formal than the first interview about reporters in war. The McDonald’s interview provides a great deal of information more so than the first interview. It also provides a lot of personal experiences such as when George Ritzer travels to Europe and sees the effect of fast food on their culture. I thought it was interesting that French people were so opposed to having coke be integrated into their society because they were afraid that it was going to ruin the wine industry. It is somewhat sad how as soon as fast food restaurants came to France then fast food croissant stores popped up throughout France. It represents the deterioration of a culture.

            The argument of speaks in the first interview can be somewhat confusing. It shows that the viewpoint of the author by using statements of multiple other people. This could be a problem in being a credible source because a lot of these quotes could have been taken out of context and not really be as useful or meaningful when used in context from what they said originally.

Different Perspectives in Texts

I think that all of these texts presented both in the case study and in the other chapter previously read about avatars present different viewpoints and perspectives on issues. Each person has his or her opinion that is never exactly the same as the next. An example of this is the differing opinions between Mark Meadows and Jason Rowe. Both enjoy using avatars but for completely different reasons. Meadows likes avatars because they allow someone to make a portrait of the way that they feel on the inside to show their true feelings. However, Rowe enjoys using avatars because of his physical disabilities. Since he does not look like everyone else he finds it troubling to fit in in public. However, when he uses his avatar to play online games with friends he is just like everyone else and has no physical limitations. Nobody else has any clue that there is anything wrong with him and he can fit in just like the rest of the online gaming world. These are two texts that show two different perspectives that are all based on personal experiences. The one personal experience of Rowe is an escape from reality for a period of time while the experience of Meadows is the ability to express the inner feelings of the individual.

            Other differing perspectives can be seen in the articles written by Todd Boyd and Thad Mumford. They both express displeasure about racism within the sporting community, but they have different reasons for feeling displeasure. Boyd expresses his anger about how there is a double standard in sports such as basketball when players want to express their personality on the court. He says that black players are criticized for doing this while white players are applauded. This is different that Mumford, who shows displeasure simply because black athletes are being used as entertainment and nothing more. Both writers have displeasure but both present their different perspectives through their own texts.

Chapter 5 Analysis

Chapter five, in my opinion, will be very useful in researching and preparing to write this paper. I think that one of the most important parts of it is the “Iceberg of Research” because it shows that a lot of time and dedication must be put into the paper for it to be a success. I won’t be able to just look up information on my narrow topic and turn it into a large paper. I think I will have an alright time doing this because I had to do a lot of research for papers in high school, including my 4,000 word extended essay for IB.

I think that the book went into good detail about the difference between primary sources and secondary sources. This will be important in my paper and also in any other research paper because I think it’s important to have a good mix of primary and secondary sources to make a successful paper. Using too many primary sources does not show enough analysis by the writer, and using too many secondary sources show not enough concrete or concise evidence of the topic. I think that my research topic will be easy to find primary sources because there are many people that have clear cut opinions about the debate of steroids in Major League Baseball. Secondary sources will probably not be a big problem either because I should be able to make my own analyses about many different articles and statistics about the controversy.

            Statistical significance will also probably play a large role in my paper since a large part of baseball and the steroid controversy was the inflation of statistics in players taking performance enhancing drugs. I will need to use that section of the chapter to make the connection between stats of players between eras that are significant enough to show the differences in players taking steroids and players not taking steroids. Overall, I think there will be plenty of significant information to help me complete this paper.

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.