Kid, you'll move mountains.

This is my final last call, the directors cut, the end of the line, the.. oh you get the point.

Although, it was a lot of hard work, and a lot of sweat and tears looking back on actually creating this blog. I had a lot of fun.

I enjoyed how open it was to us creating and presenting our own ideas. The guidelines for the projects were specific, and the basic idea of the blog was clear (eventually ha ha), but the process of writing it was left wide open. The first half of my blog, I didn't analyze and relate the readings and works to my own ideas as much as I should have. My mind hadn't been open to research - I just wanted to analyze and get down as much as I could about what I had been shown, and what I had been told directly. I thought I was on the right track, but when I had my mid-meeting with Ian he had told me although I had some really creative ideas (he gave me mad props for my Understanding Comics bit) I should expand my thinking and incorporate new ideas and relate them to the text, not just summarize the text because the two of you already know it, and it can become repetitive. He said "We enjoy learning from our students"

I'm not going to lie. I was terribly disappointed and felt like I had let them down. I called my mom and talked to her and she told me not to give up. That I was the most brilliant girl and I shouldn't let criticism get to me the way it does- I should embrace what my professors tell me because after all they are not being paid to teach me. They are being paid to open my mind into finding my own ideas.

Regardless of what Mark and Ian think of this blog, I am so proud of it. It may not have 40 blogs, and the layout may not scream LOOK AT ME! But my ideas where my own. I learnt so much about myself and what I can do, and I believe you can actually see that as you read through my blog.

As a farewell, I was going to end this blog with a quote by Dr Seuss that read 'Don't cry because it is over, smile because it happened.' But, I felt more inspired by my favourite book to this day, and I think it would be a beautiful ending... to a beautiful farewell. (That, and it relates perfectly to what I was talking about before. ha ha)

Oh, the Places You'll Go!
Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You're off to Great Places!
You're off and away!
You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You're on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who'll decide where to go.
You'll look up and down streets. Look 'em over with care.
About some you will say, "I don't choose to go there."
With your head full of brains and your shoes full of feet,
you're too smart to go down any not-so-good street.
And you may not find any
you'll want to go down.
In that case, of course,
you'll head straight out of town.
It's opener there
in the wide open air.
Out there things can happen
and frequently do
to people as brainy
and footsy as you.
And when things start to happen,
don't worry. Don't stew.
Just go right along.
You'll start happening too.
OH!
THE PLACES YOU'LL GO!
You'll be on your way up!
You'll be seeing great sights!
You'll join the high fliers
who soar to high heights.
You won't lag behind, because you'll have the speed.
You'll pass the whole gang and you'll soon take the lead.
Wherever you fly, you'll be the best of the best.
Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.
Except when you don' t
Because, sometimes, you won't.
I'm sorry to say so
but, sadly, it's true
and Hang-ups
can happen to you.
You can get all hung up
in a prickle-ly perch.
And your gang will fly on.
You'll be left in a Lurch.
You'll come down from the Lurch
with an unpleasant bump.
And the chances are, then,
that you'll be in a Slump.
And when you're in a Slump,
you're not in for much fun.
Un-slumping yourself
is not easily done.
You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.
Some windows are lighted. But mostly they're darked.
A place you could sprain both you elbow and chin!
Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?
How much can you lose? How much can you win?
And IF you go in, should you turn left or right...
or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite?
Or go around back and sneak in from behind?
Simple it's not, I'm afraid you will find,
for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.
You can get so confused
that you'll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
The Waiting Place...
...for people just waiting.
Waiting for a train to go
or a bus to come, or a plane to go
or the mail to come, or the rain to go
or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
or waiting around for a Yes or a No
or waiting for their hair to grow.
Everyone is just waiting.
Waiting for the fish to bite
or waiting for wind to fly a kite
or waiting around for Friday night
or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake
or a pot to boil, or a Better Break
or a sting of pearls, or a pair of pants
or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.
Everyone is just waiting.
NO!
That's not for you!
Somehow you'll escape
all that waiting and staying.
You'll find the bright places
where Boom Bands are playing.
With banner flip-flapping,
once more you'll ride high!
Ready for anything under the sky.
Ready because you're that kind of a guy!
Oh, the places you'll go! There is fun to be done!
There are points to be scored. there are games to be won.
And the magical things you can do with that ball
will make you the winning-est winner of all.
Fame! You'll be famous as famous can be,
with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.
Except when they don't.
Because, sometimes, they won't.
I'm afraid that some times
you'll play lonely games too.
Games you can't win
'cause you'll play against you.
All Alone!
Whether you like it or not,
Alone will be something
you'll be quite a lot.
And when you're alone, there's a very good chance
you'll meet things that scare you right out of your pants.
There are some, down the road between hither and yon,
that can scare you so much you won't want to go on.
But on you will go
though the weather be foul
On you will go
though your enemies prowl
On you will go
though the Hakken-Kraks howl
Onward up many
a frightening creek,
though your arms may get sore
and your sneakers may leak.
On and on you will hike
and I know you'll hike far
and face up to your problems
whatever they are.
You'll get mixed up, of course,
as you already know.
You'll get mixed up
with many strange birds as you go.
So be sure when you step.
Step with care and great tact
and remember that Life's
a Great Balancing Act.
Just never forget to be dexterous and deft.
And never mix up your right foot with your left.
And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and 3 / 4 percent guaranteed.)
KID, YOU'LL MOVE MOUNTAINS!
So...
be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray
or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O'Shea,
you're off to Great Places!
Today is your day!
Your mountain is waiting.
So...get on your way!
---Dr. Seuss

Holy Knapsacks Batman!

I can't even believe it! I woke up early Sunday morning and turned on my computer. Every morning I look at the side Google Gadgets to see all the latest news updates (updates by the minute!). I always just scan through to find the most interesting titles and this one caught my eye "New Type of Prehistoric Man". I clicked on it, thinking 'Anything to do with a new type of man has got to be good! Because let me tell you, the ones we have kicking around right now are doing nothing for me.' I was shocked to read that earlier Saturday morning Dr. Hewson (not to be confused with the Dr. Hewson that worked with William Hunter) a paleontologist who has been digging in the Namib Desert in South Africa and discovered proof of a prehistoric Batman.

The bones that were found were the size of an average 10 year old (about 4'2). The 'Batman' appeared to be in a standing position however, the back was arched, the arms not fully extended and little wing bones were protruding from the back of it's spine. The bones had been dug out and sent to the Paleontology Research Institute in Ithaca, New York. In their research they concluded that the batman dwelled the earth in the Lower Paleolithic Era.. aka the early stone age two million years ago – 100,000 B.C.

It is assumed that he fed on insects and the blood of small animals, but that is not of certain yet. No further research has been done, but there will be constant updates made at this website:

PLEASE CHECK IT OUT!

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/22007/

What hurts more my brain, eyes, fingers, or back?

I am stressing out. I am not going to lie. I have been trying to get all these blogs done, and I did not necessarily procrastinated too much, but a little. At least I am honest. I hate that I know my writing is weak, yet, I haven’t done anything about it. I know I can do so much better than I am. Ugh. Next semester I will do better, and that if I have learned anything from Lipton’s class it is that procrastination is going to be what makes or breaks you.

I also think I am going to take full advantage of the writing center from now on. It's not like I am failing my classes, but I can't stand to settle for an average, if not below average, mark. It just isn't me. Being average, is not what gets you remembered by teachers and classmates,
Being outstanding does.

Where was this epiphany 4 weeks ago? (HEY! I just had an epiphany! I can scratch that off my list of things to do!)

Running out of time... line. (It's lame, but so early in the morning)

The Timeline

The last and final of all the projects. I hated doing this project. When the group we put together at the beginning of the year discussed our goals and aspirations for all of our group projects everything we had thought of looked promising. Slowly as the semester progressed only the selected few in our group progressed along - I am not immature enough to name names, but I feel almost used by a couple of the procrastinating group members who put thier time into their own projects and completely dodging out on helping out at all...

For the Timeline we all had a group meeting and discussed few topics, and quickly decided on one we all thought was interesting. We came up with the theme of technologies for audio recorded media. We began with Cavemen, how they started with just cave drawings that eventually became universal- but were shortly lost to the grunts and moans now known as an English Language- and ending with Cd's.

The way this project was supposed to work was alot like the way we did the podcast. We chose that style because the organization of our podcast went smoothly and everyone did thier parts. I was initially just assigned Cavemen, but ended up doing that as well as the phonograph. Adam worked on the vynel records, and Cara did her part on the Cassette tapes.

To do the timeline Cara, Adam and I searched photo's together and later in the day when Cara went to work at the mall she picked up some paper and string and finished up the project. I love the colour scheme CARA! :D

This is what we have for our information; it is incomplete without the CD as we were told last minute that the member of the group was not going to be completing it. *cough* Jerk *cough* but the information we have is interesting anyways.

Cave men carved or scratched pictures with the stone sharpened-stone tools onto walls of the cave. These drawings were representations of events that happened in thier daily life ex. Hunting victories. Record keepers developed systematic symbols that represented words and sentences that were faster to draw, and universally recognized.
In early trading Cavemen used clay (portable records) with pictographs to record the quantities of materials traded or shipped. These pictographs evolved and slowly lost their picture detail and became abstract-figures that represented sounds in the spoken language.

"Cave Drawing." National Wildlife Federation. 2007. National Wildlife Federation. 19 Nov. 2007 .
Combs, S. "Letter to Mom and Dad." 2007. 19 Nov. 2007 .
"Inventors; a Brief History of Writing Instruments." About.Com. 2007. About Inc. 19 Nov. 2007 http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa100197.htm.

It is hard to imagine going for my morning jogs without having “I am a winner” by The Aquabats blaring into my ears and setting the pace, or listening to my favourite Avenge Sevenfold song when I need some cheering up. With the help of Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph created on December 4th, 1877 it wouldn’t be possible. The phonograph was really invented while Edison was working on the telephone. Initially the telephone was invented as a faster way to send telegraphs for the Western Union – “But the problem was that the telephone could transmit information much more quickly than a telegraph. It was not economical to slow the transmission down to the rate at which someone could transcribe it. What was needed was a way to record the message so it could be played back later at a slower speed. This problem provided the motivation for the invention of the phonograph.” (Turn of the Century 1)
The making of the phonograph was done with a needle known as a stylus. The stylus was then held up against a rapidly moving cylinder with tin foil wrapped around it. It had two separate diaphragm / needle units. One was used for recording the voice or sound, and the other was used to play it back. When a noise was picked up by the recording needle the sound vibrations would get indented onto the cylinder and would later be able to be played back.
In the North American Review written in June 1878 Edison had made a list of the things he had thought the phonograph would be used for in future times;

Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer.
Phonographic books, which will speak to blind people without effort on their part.
The teaching of elocution.
Reproduction of music.
The "Family Record"--a registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by members of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons.
Music-boxes and toys.
Clocks that should announce in articulate speech the time for going home, going to meals, etc.
The preservation of languages by exact reproduction of the manner of pronouncing.
Educational purposes; such as preserving the explanations made by a teacher, so that the pupil can refer to them at any moment, and spelling or other lessons placed upon the phonograph for convenience in committing to memory.
Connection with the telephone, so as to make that instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication.
(The Library of Congress 2)
So it was no surprise when Edison Phonograph Works also produced musical cylinders for coin-slot phonographs – aka early jukeboxes, which pointed the future of the phonograph as an entertainment machine.
You could see how much this invention had an impact on society and media as a whole. The creation of records was later created and the completion of the telephone which is still used today. A negative effect was created (and any invention would create, even today) as the starting of elitism grew larger. Elitism is just the belief that certain people or certain classes deserve special treatment by virtue of their perceived. When new forms of technology are released the pricing is ridiculously high making it so “only the rich” can afford to purchase or use it.
1. Donna Yankowitz , The Turn Of The Century, The Phonograph. 2007 <http://www.ushistory.net/phono.html>Dr. James H. Billington,The Library of Congress, Inventing Entertainment: The History of the Edison Cylinder Phonograph, 2007 < http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edcyldr.html

(taken from Adam's Blog - for his part)

Our project was focused on forms of projecting music or information. Music is considered a form of social opposition when it is used in that way, so the way music gets around is a big factor. Its creation had to do with making a better quality in music, as technology progressed people’s demand for better forms of it rose. I picked to research vinyl, which was an important form of recording music from the 1930’s up until now even. It was most involved in the hippie movement of the 60s, when psychedelic music and rock ‘n’ roll were a huge part of society.

(taken from Cara's Blog- for her part)

The cassette tape was responsible for many social phenomena since its creation in 1963 by Philips Electronics. But there is one main connection that the cassette tape has to culture of the 1970s-90s, and it is that of the hip-hop culture. Small and compact, the cassette tape was the first portable piece of audio equipment with recording on the piece. With the help of the Sony Walkman in 1979, this was made possible for individuals to mobility with audio recordings. This is where one can see the start of hip-hop culture becoming more popular, because MCs and Breakdancers were provided with the mobility to spread the idea of hip-hop culture. This culture would be blown away with what would come next. The highly anticipated, large-and-loud style boombox, or ghetto blaster, was created in 1981, further advancing the Breakdancing scene, because now, breakers could make an entire style out of carrying around this huge music playing device. Relating back to the cassette tape, these two aspects of hip hop culture were a result of the cassette tape, and essentially, pushed the hip hop movement to a great start.

Bibliography

Bellis, Mary. “The History of Sound Recording.” About.com. 2007. New York Times Company. November 25, 2007.

Bellis, Mary. “The History of The Cassette Tape.” About.com. 2007. New York Times Company. November 25, 2007.

“Boombox Birth.” Pocket Calculator Show. 2007. Boombox Museum. November 25, 2007.

I'm On Fire, And Now I Think I'm Ready To Bust A Move

The Film Project



This Project was BY FAR the funnest project of all of them to work on. I am not certain if it was because the idea we had for our film was to make a music video and it just so happened to be one of my favourite songs. Or, if I am just so in love with myself that I love watching myself over and over and over while I dance around making the wildest faces imaginable.
Its definitely option two.
Regardless, The group worked really well with this one. We basically put Cara's iPod on random and the song came up and the ideas just started rolling. The song we chose can not be described as anything but perfection, "The Future Freaks Me Out" by Motion City Soundtrack.

MOTION CITY SOUNDTRACK LYRICS
"The Future Freaks Me Out"

I’m on fire and now I think I’m ready to bust a move
Check it out I’m rocking steady Go!
Betty won’t stop listening to modern rock
How she hates to be alone
I try to compensate her lack of love with coffee cake
Ice cream and a bottle of ten dollar wine she says hey
I rock the Haro sport
I rock the cow girl blues
I rock too fast for love
I’m footloose in my Velcro shoes
What’s up with Will and Grace?
I don’t get drum and bass
The future freaks me out
I’m on fire and now I think I'm ready to bust a move
Check it out I’m rocking steady
To the beat in my head
It goes oh, oh-oh-oh
I know that she’s the only one
I’d rather waste our time together
Yeah, ‘cause we can get down
Betty can’t quit carving question marks in my wrist
How come we’re so alone
We waste away the days with nicotine and television samples
From an era we hate to admit we embrace
We fail to represent
We fail to be content
We fail at everything we ever even try to attempt
And so the story goes
As only Betty knows
It’s time to take control(Get Down)
I’m on fire and now I think I'm ready to bust a move
Check it out I’m rocking steady
To the beat in my head
It goes oh, oh-oh-oh
I know that she’s the only one
I’d rather waste my time with her
Betty, I need you
I miss you
I’m so alone without you
To call up on the weekends with my cellular phone
Betty it's so hard to relate
To the whole human race
I don’t know where to begin
I don’t know where to begin
If we can both find a way
To do the things that we say
We might not sit in our rooms
And drink our daydreams away
Betty, I’m a dreamer
I’m not a vicious schemer
Oh Betty won’t you.. ah fuck it
I’m on fire and now I think
I'm ready to bust a move
Check it out I’m rocking steady
To the beat in my head
It goes oh, oh-oh-oh
I know that she’s the only one
I’d rather waste our time together
Yeah, ‘cause we can get down.

Katherine, Cara, and I wrote the script out on paper. I felt that our idea of taking people who are terrified and don't understand modern technology was humorous. It showed a real life depiction of how older people must feel about all the newest gadgets we young kids are into today.





This reminded me of one family Christmas my entire family was sitting around the table after dinner and I had pulled out my camera and started making a video. When it was finished recording my grandparent's were both in complete amazement. And my grandfather, being the cutest old man alive, pulled out his hearing aid and pointed it at me. He told me to smile and then said "You don't realize it, but I just took a picture of you, and all I have to do to view it is place it back in my ear". In comparison to my father's parents who grew up poor and raised seven children my mother's parents were very accepting of modern technology. My ma mere and pa pere ( Daddy's Parents) were a lot more techno-challenged and culture shocked. I never pulled the video camera phone out for them because they would never understand it. I remember pulling out one of my new camera's (when digital film just came out) , when I was trying to make a video of them dancing they wouldn't stop posing for it regardless of how many times I told them it was a video. In our film, the two main characters whom started out being terrified of the new technology sucked it up, and progressed and grew with modern technology (which I feel everyone has to do to survive, especially with companies as I proved previously with Music World shutting down, but HMV surviving).
Back to the film. Once we had finished writing Cara and I grabbed Adam and he helped video tape the entire thing. It didn't take very long because we felt we didn't need it to be overly professional. Acting it out was quite possibly the most exciting thing to do EVER! ha ha I had so much fun! We only had to do a couple retakes but for the most part we got the shots on our first try ( or maybe, we just aren't picky enough). Once we got all the footage Cara and I (but mainly Cara, I was there for moral support and I am actually really interested in learning how to edit) went to her room and edited the film cutting and pasting making sure everything fit with the music.

This is our video;



As a side note, I would just like to point out, that in the scene where Cara and I are standing there and she shows me the iPod and puts the headphones on my head, we are using an iPod extension pack that has an iPod plugged into the top of it sitting straight up. However, we covered that with a water bottle. This reminds me of that modonna video- nothing is done by accident.

Thank you Mark Lipton for this assignment! :D I LOVE YOU! ha ha!

Mind Control and Tin Foil Caps

Culture Jamming

"Mass media monopolies control people by their control of information." - John F Kennedy

Maybe it is because I just did an entire essay on facebook, and myspace, and how huge corporations are looking into buying the information off of those sites for researching their market that this first line of Mark Dery's Culture Jamming popped out like a fish out of water. The Internet is a very scary thing to think about. Just the fact that you can Google a persons name and have old articles written about them come up, or pages that they have created themselves, if not websites that just mentioned them. The mass amount of information out there now a days is ridiculously intimidating.

I remember about two years ago my brother was pulled over for drinking and driving and the police report was on the Internet. I was researching drunk drivers for one of my school assignments, because on top of my brother being caught, a few months prior one of our best friends died in an accident. Anyways, I was researching the topic and not only did the report of my dead friend come up, but my brothers report came up as well. Right there, clear as day, for everyone to read. I was slightly embarrassed.

After running into that I googled my own name, and my boyfriends name at the time. He ran a small record company named Oi Man Records and so there were indie bands that had done interviews with small London local magazines and his name had been brought up several times. When I googled my name, I was extremely disappointed to see that a woman named Lisa Goulet runs her own Real Estate project, and appppppaaaaraaannntly that is way more important than anything I have done. I specified my search and old articles of my band came up, as well as my facebook page, my old myspace page, and an old online journal I had started to keep- but fell away from for the classic pen and paper.

"We believe we live in the 'age of information,' that there has been an information 'explosion,' an information 'revolution.' " (Dery 1)

This quote I believe touches on more than the Internet. As people become more technologically advanced the amount of information and the means to acquire it expands also. We have the Internet, Television, Newspapers, Magazines, Novels, Friends, Schools and Teachers, Radios etc. All spieling out loads of information daily. Journalists flock to giant scenes, and terrifying murders - and for the most part in celebrities lives- the paparazzi is the reason for car accidents and life changing drama.

"The objective was not simply to tame the press but to transform it into an unwitting mouthpiece of the government. " (Dery 1)

"More recent is the notion that the public mind is being colonized by corporate phantasms -- wraith like images of power and desire that haunt our dreams. Consider the observations of Neal Gabler:
Everywhere the fabricated, the inauthentic and the theatrical have gradually driven out the natural, the genuine and the spontaneous until there is no distinction between real life and stagecraft. In fact, one could argue that the theatricalization of American life is the major cultural transformation of this century."

"And Marshall Blonsky:
We can no longer do anything without wanting to see it immediately on video...There is never any longer an event or a person who acts for himself, in himself. The direction of events and of people is to be reproduced into image, to be doubled in the image of television. Today the referent disappears. In circulation are images. Only images."

These quotes I believe mean more now than ever before. I can say that with confidence as I sit and watch The Hills with some of my closest girlfriends. 'Reality' television has taken over our television sets and bombarded our minds. People have become obsessed with it, possibly because it is real life drama. A friend of mine was chosen to be on Canada's Next Top Model (Cori MacKinnon) and this past week-end I got to speak with her about it. She told me as excited as she was to be on television (what with all the glory that came along with it being from such a small town) she felt that they had taken certain parts of her character and only accentuated them revealing a false depiction of her. She felt as though she was 'media raped', and that the producers of the show wildly misinterpreted a lot of the things she had said, cutting out parts of conversations to make it look like whatever it is they thought would sell. I felt absolutely disgusted. This just goes to show, you really never know what it is you are watching, the 'truth' could just be a cut and paste of the producers point of view.

"The image is the reflection of a basic reality; it masks and perverts a basic reality; it masks the absence of a basic reality; it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum" (Dery 1)

"The receiver of the message seems to have a residual freedom: the freedom to read it in a different way...I am proposing an action to urge the audience to control the message and its multiple possibilities of interpretation. One medium can be employed to communicate a series of opinions on another medium...The universe of Technological Communication would then be patrolled by groups of communications guerrillas, who would restore a critical dimension to passive reception." (Dery 1)

Oh SNAP!

In addition to my last post, I had been thinking about other technology advances that would put certain markets out of business had they not changed with their rapidly changing markets.

I thought of the accelerating drop in old-fashioned film due to the invention of the digital camera. It has only been recent that digital camera's have been made more affordable resulting in a bigger market.
Although I own a digital camera I would like to note that I do miss the element of surprise when you go to pick up your recently developed film. You don't get very many bad , or poor quality photographs anymore because they can be instantly deleted. I can't even remember the last time I looked through a photo album that wasn't displayed on a computer screen.
It makes me sad.

It's the end of Music World as we know it (And I feel fine)

Last summer I had a job working for CD plus in the Suncoast mall located in Goderich Ontario. The store closed down shortly after I had quit working there. I thought maybe it was because Goderich in general is slowly decreasing in population and that there simply was just not enough means to keep the store going. It was not a surprise.
More recently, I noticed that the Music World in the mall had been closed down, and later found out that Music World had declared bankruptcy. Music World is the last Canadian owned music store, and it's 79 plus stores across the country will all be closing down in the next month or so putting more than 650 employees out of work. On top of that the franchise has lost over $9 million dollars in the past year alone.

http://videos.canoe.ca/index.jsp?auto_band=x&rf=sv&fr_story=FRdamp228625
This is a link to a short news cast by the Toronto Sun discussing the Music World Bankruptcy.

So why the massive decrease in record sales? If you don't know at least one answer to this question I will ask you where have you been the past couple decades. Music Industries want to blame piracy, and why not? More and more people are downloading music with programs such as limewire, or paying cheaper prices for CD's online with iTunes, because it is more convenient than trekking to the Cd store. Critics however, are pointing the finger at over pricing and poor quality of products and bad marketing tactics. An Mp3 doesn't scratch, iPod's don't skip, and neither of them take up half the space in your room due to an over abundance of cases. An added perk is once downloaded your computer automatically lists it alphabetically leaving you with more time to do other more important things, as well as saving you time on having to search hours to hear that song you've had in your head all day. Music stores just can not compete with the convenience or prices of downloading.
I would like to argue however, that the entertainment industry seems to be the only industry that does not change with their market, when they first realize it is changing on them. When other businesses (for example Tim Hortons- selling more than coffee and donuts, supporting a vast variety of foods and broadening their market) see that their market needs a change and they change with it.
Although I must give credit where it is due, as HMV (a British store, also the biggest chain in the country) has already started slowly moving away from pitching Cd's and is looking more into the growing industry of DVD sales, and video games. Although Cd sales have been decreasing rapidly, the number of households with DVD players has tripled over the past 5 years. In 2001, DVD sales went from 313 million to 1.1 billion. Similarly, the number of households that have broadband Internet connections has quadrupled! That is an extra $30 dollars a month spent on Internet connections, as well as another $10 million in DVD sales- you could only assume that there has to be a cut in entertainment spending somewhere, and music is the easiest and fastest to obtain for free.
(For more statistics visit http://mpaa.org/researchStatistics.asp , p 51)
Businesses will continue to be a successful if they continue to expand and grow with technology, taking full advantage of it opposed to blaming it for loss of sales. For example, recently HMV has mentioned a shift toward more of an online presence, kind of like iTunes. I wish them the best of luck.

Take a sip of this, take that... Don't it feel good baby

Recently one of my friends-friends just died of an Ecstasy overdose. As well as, someone I know very well.. *shifty eyes* almost died and was hospitalized from it after trying it for her first time. It's just strange how we ignore all the warnings we are given in the media, and from family, and teachers - when we try it anyways and think "oh - but that wont happen to me".

Oddly enough, I've been really interested in reading books where the characters have some sort of addiction. I read through pages of how they got started, how they got hooked, and the struggles they go through as an addict. These books don't necessarily glorify drugs, and in some parts they scare me to wits end. Yet, I still feel compelled to read more, compelled to find out more about the drugs, and yes, maybe a little interested in what the high must actually feel like for people to become so addicted to them. Luckily, I am smart enough not to get into it.






The three books I've read this year are Crank by Ellen Hopkins (beautiful), Millions of Little Pieces by James Frey(Horrifying), and Party Monster by James St. James (depressing, and MESSED UP). Each book touches both the good and the bad of drug addictions. The bad , is a given- you become less of a person, the hazard on your health, the danger in a bad hit / bad trip, death, the financial strain resulting in prostitution's and theft, and the over all need. Frey's story was the most touching, and I felt best depicted what it was like inside the mind of a drug addict who had done anything (including sniffing glue) to get away from problems, in reality, only spiralling farther down the rabbit hole. After I finished reading these three novels I felt extremely interested in what makes people start to do drugs, and what the media and government has done to prevent, and in some cases, glorify the usage of illegal/prescription drugs.
Ever since the late 1930's there has been an awareness of drugs becoming popular. Video's were created by the government used as propaganda to prevent the usage of drugs such as LSD and Marijuana among the younger crowds.



Such as this film created in 1938 titled Reefer Madness. This film was made to show the effects of marijuana. I think that the film went slightly overboard, and as a result was looked at as more of a joke ( as most other propaganda films made in the 50's and 60's

Online Videos by Veoh.com


(http://listverse.com/politics/top-10-propaganda-videos/). Presently , if you are one watching these films, it's something I found most students would do while they were high as entertainment.
A couple years ago George W. Bush had gotten himself into some hot water when he tried to release a new version of an Anti-drug video. The Accountability Office(an investigative arm of Congress) had stated "that the Bush administration violated federal law by producing and distributing television news segments about the effects of drug use among young people.
The accountability office said the videos "constitute covert propaganda" because the government was not identified as the source of the materials, which were distributed by the Office of National Drug Control Policy"(Files 1). I questioned the reasoning's of why the Accountability Offices would be upset about an anti-drug video only to find it was because Bush was using tax payers money to create these video's and that the making of 'mock news segments' broke a fundamental principal of an open-government.
There is other legal action that has been taking place in the war against drugs. For example, making it illegal. Drugs like cocaine, heroin, and marijuana get treated the same in the Narcotic control act, however talks of legalizing marijuana have been brought up a few times. There is a lot of good and bad responses to the idea including "personal use should be tied to a national drug strategy that promotes awareness and prevention, and provides for comprehensive treatment." (Munroe 2) and "marijuana is a gateway drug to harder drugs ,
decriminalization would send conflicting messages to young people, and
concern expressed by U.S. drug enforcement officials that relaxing Canadian marijuana laws would increase the likelihood of more marijuana flowing south across the border and could make efforts to secure the Canada-U.S. border more difficult." (Munroe 2) (For more information on Canada's drug law visit http://www.cfdp.ca/drug.htm , or http://www.cfdp.ca/sen8ex1.htm).
It still has not been legalized and the punishments are still quite severe- Depending on what you had done and how much you had in your possession the charge could be up to 10 years in jail, and a fine of $2000 dollars.

Something that had been brought to my attention while researching Canada's and America's drug laws was a couple articles talking about celebrities and celebrity drug scandals. Headlines included Kate Moss, Brittany Spears, Whitney Houston, and of course Lindsay Lohan. The glorification of drugs in young Hollywood made by these girls I find could be dangerous to the young public who views them as idols. There is enough pressure on kids without having to watch there favourite young celebrity getting in some trouble with their agencies ( Kate Moss almost loosing several contracts when she was outed as a cocaine addict), the law ( Whitney Houston being charged for the possession of cocaine and other illegal substances), and the tabloids (Brittany spears and Kevin- neglection of the kids. broken marriage, as well as alcohol and prescription drug abuse). It is interesting to see however the elitism celebrities get when it comes to possession and the use of narcotics. Take for example this past August when Lindsay Lohan was sentenced to do a single day in jail for drug possession and a drinking and driving charge. She was released within 84 minutes upon entering, where anyone else with the same charge would be getting 10 years plus. Two other very popular instances where with Nicole Richie's 4 day sentence for driving under the influence of drugs- and being let free after an hour and 20 minutes. Also, Paris Hilton's being let free after 3 days of being in jail, when her sentence was 45 days! I do not feel that this is a good impression to be made on people. This is not only outrageous, it makes a mockery of the judicial system.
Young Hollywood has not been the first and will most likely not be the last in the glorification of hard drugs. In the past photographers used the underground heroin scene to sell jeans for Calvin Klein. Today, the photographers exploit celebrities rehab situations to sell magazines. There is a huge profit to be made in drug addictions, eating disorders, and sex scandals. Why would we do anything about it? *roll eyes*

School Girl Crush

HAHAHAHA I completely forgot about being a total creeper in class with my BUILT IN WEBCAM!!!!

How unappropriate. haha

Yea man, just add me on FACEBOOK!

Media Hegemonies.
The media hegemony we chose to look at was the ever so fast growing and popular facebook. The first thing we looked at was thealbumoftheday.com/facebook, then got together and discussed and made up a brain map for the corporation of facebook. Its pretty new so there isnt that much information bout the hegemonic views. Although it is everywhere. Parents use it, kids use it, people in the government, and now more than ever- large corporations are working on buying it out to use as a source of information about the general public. However, unlike other networking websites (for example, Myspace or Xanga - who have been bought out by NewsCorp) facebook still has it's own entity and has only begun to move towards a "controlled social environment".
When you start up your own facebook account there is a little box you must check that allows facebook to take all information you put on there page and do with it what they will. There terms of use is constantly updated, and can be changed and revised anyway they like. Most people are very ignorant to this information, if they read it before signing up for access to the site at all. Since they state that they have access to all your information and can do with it what they will, this is like a goldmine when it comes to advertisers, and big corporations. The truth of this is really shown by Microsofts recent purchase of 1.6% of Facebook, for the price of $240 million.

Here are some key points that we have placed onto our visual poster for the hegemonies project:
First venture capital money to Facebook was $500,000 from Peter Theil, founder and former CEO of paypal. He has written a book called the Diversity Myth, which received many notable praises from neo-conservatives like William Kristol.

Further funding comes from Accel Partners Inc, another venture capitalist firm. They donated over 12 million. James Breyer is the manager of the company, and formerly on the chair of the national venture capital associations (NVCA). And served on the board with Gilman Louie who is the CEO of In-Q-Tel. In-Q-Tel is funded by the CIA and is a firm that works on gathering all aspects of gathering data about people.

Breyer has also been on the board of BBN Technologies, which is a research and development firm most known for starting the Internet. A board member at BBN Tech is Dr. Anita Jones who has served on In-Q-tel herself and has also been involved Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The Information Awareness Office was shutdown after protests against privacy issues. The main reason for this organizations creation was to a database of information about everyone. It seems like Facebook has taken on this organizations intentions only in a consentual way. The IAO was also receiving funding from the CIA.




For more information on facebook, and their terms of services here are some great links I found.
http://www.facebook.com/terms.php
http://www.facebook.com/ads/
http://developers.facebook.com/
http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=41997 (this page gives a TON of links)
Other topics we looked up; DARPA, Elisha Jones

The world will never understand

I hate thinking about semiotics. period.
What I get from it, is it is the study of signs with implicit and explicit meanings. It is a theoretical way to analyze the world around us that distinguishes between:
"- semantics: the relationship of signs to what they stand for;
- syntactics (or syntax): the formal or structural relations between signs;
- pragmatics: the relation of signs to interpreters (Chandler 1)."

Semiotics is what distinguishes our different views because of what we have been shown, what we have absorbed our entire lives. This is why in the process of encoding and decoding sometimes the message the addresser is trying to get across may never get decoded at all by the addressee, he may not have been taught or shown anything in that subject to understand.

This reminded me of something Cara had been talking about earlier in the year, as well as something else I had heard of quite a few years ago, Feral Children. The two that are most known are the wild child, who was raised by dogs until he was the age of 12. Found at a very young age after his parents had left him in the woods to die. Or, a young girl named Genie. Her parents had tied her to a chair up in their attic until she was 13 years old. She had no communication, education, stimulation, or even light. When she was found, not only could she only whimper since having no prior communication with anyone- but she could also not stand erect because she was tied to a potty-chair her whole life (except for the nights when she was remembered. She would then get strapped into an over sized crib that had a metal sheet as an overhead cover) and never learnt to stand. Apparently, her father was psychotic. He hated children and had killed two children previous to Genie. One died of pneumonia when he left it in a garage, a second choked on his own mucus. There was a third child that was saved by the grandmother, and he is still alive today and helped in aiding the mother to feed Genie. Neither of them spoke to her because they feared the father, and had been victimized themselves. "The discovery of Genie aroused intense curiosity among psychologist, linguists, neurologists, and others who study brain developement. They were eager to know what Genie’s mental level was at the time she was found and whether she would be capable of developing her faculties (Pines 2). She had been rehabilitated and over went through special training to try and teach her to communicate. What they had found out in their research was that there is a critical time in a childs development where if the 'language acquisition' is not stimulated it may become impaired later on if it emerges at all (Pines 2).

Susan Curtiss, a psychologist, worked with genie in trying to help he develop speech. Curtiss also was working to develop a hypothesis about language and the relationship between the left and right sides of the brain.

"When Genie arrived in Children’s Hospital in November 1970, she was a pitiful, malformed, incontinent, un-socialized, and severely malnourished creature. Although she was beginning to show signs of pubescence, she weighed only 59 pounds. She could not straighten her arms or legs. She did not know how to chew. She salivated a great deal and spent much of her time spitting" (Curtiss 1). She walked with a jerky motion with her hands curled up like a rabbit, and within seven moths she had learned how to speak roughly one hundred words and was able to conjoin two of them together ("big teeth", or "Little Marble"), and she was also potty trained.
However, she had a lot of saliva and would drool everywhere and all over her clothes. She also masturbated obsessively.

According to Eric Lenneberg, language can only be learned during the critical period between two years of age and puberty. This theory was created in 1967, and was proven wrong in 1971 when genie was found, and started her special training. "the brain of a child before the age of two is not sufficiently mature for the acquisition of language, while after puberty, when the brain’s organization is complete, it has lost its flexibility and can no longer acquire a first language" ( Lenneberg 1). This is not one hundred percent accurate as Genie showed by learning few words, but the basic idea is correct. She still can not communicate as effectively as most 3 year olds, which has also been shown when her progress came to a halt a few years later. This can also be described as the third principle of perception from Lipton's notes "We are not born perceiving. We learn to perceive and not to percive"

"Among human beings, four-week-old babies can recognize the difference between some 40 consonants that are used in human languages, as shown by how their sucking and heartbeats change when different consonant sounds are presented by audiotape. That ability seems to be innate, since babies respond to many more consonants that are used in their parents’ language—English, for example, has only 24 consonant sounds, yet babies of English-speaking parents react to the consonants present in Japanese. Babies lose that ability as they grow up. By the age of six, when children enter school, their ability to hear the difference between sounds to which they have not been exposed in their own language is severely reduced. Feature detectors responsible for recognizing about a dozen consonant sounds have so far been inferred to exist in the human brain. They need to be triggered by the environment, however: if not, they appear to atrophy." (Pine 1)

Although Genie had ended up learning different words, she didn't understand verbs or grammar, nor did she know how to ask a question. Noam Chomsky theorized that grammatical principles are what distinguishes the language of human beings to that of an animal.

The following is the transcript for the television program Secret of the Wild Child hosted by the NOVA station;
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2112gchild.html

A song that was written about Genie by an Indie band named Killjoy Confetti. If you go to this link you can both view the song lyrics, and clink another link to hear the song... ( I wouldn't suggest it though. ha ha)
http://www.feralchildren.com/en/listbooks.php?bk=arcade

And finally, this is a video clip from the documentary made about Feral Children named Mockingbird Don't Sing






"model of oral communication is (for its time) innovatingly labelled as a 'speech circuit' and includes directional arrows indicating the involvement of both participants (thus at least implying 'feedback'), it too was nevertheless a linear transmission model (albeit a 'two-track' one). It was based on the notion that comprehension on the part of the listener is a kind of mirror of the speaker's initial process of expressing a thought (Saussure 1983, 11-13; Saussure 1974, 11-13; Harris 1987, 22-25, 204-218). In this model there is only the briefest of allusions to the speaker's use of 'the code provided by the language', together with the implicit assumption that a fixed code is shared (Saussure 1983, 14; Saussure 1974, 14; " (Chandler 1)

1. Daniel Chandler, Semiotics For Beginners, Encoding/Decoding, February 19th, 2001.

<http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem08c.html>

2. Myra Pines, Tripod, The Civilizing of Genie, October 8th, 2002

<http://kccesl.tripod.com/genie.html> Other names used with this link; Susan Curtiss, and Eric Lenneberg

3. Andrew Ward, The Regents of the University of California, Genie, A modern day wild child, 2007

<http://www.feralchildren.com/en/showchild.php?ch=genie>

All the flowers would have very extra special powers...They could sit and talk to me for hours

I remember in the very first class we had with Mark Lipton, he told us he loved metaphors. before class was over, he had mentioned how all of us had been little seeds, and although we may believe all he is doing is feeding us large amounts of fertilizer, we all have the potential to become beautiful flowers. I asked him what his favourite flower was at the end of class, and he told me he loves white tulips, and find gingersnaps to be the most interesting. Then in class last week he had talked about shovelling shit - and mentioned something about 'not using that in our end letter, because that was his metaphor'. It made sense, so I figured... I might as well make one up on my own. Except I'm not going to write it about him, or his class... just the part of it that stressed me out the most, the blog.



Blogs, and more specifically, the type of blog that Mark Lipton has us writing are like leaves. The nature of a leaf, is to fall, fade and eventually disintegrate into nothing. However, in a new season, new ones will stem from the old. I sat and thought about how many students will actually keep their blogs when all is said and done. If they are not kept up with, the memories of them will fall from our minds as something we only once were, and the beliefs we only once thought about. As for the people who have not kept up with them but have kept a record of their old thoughts, and things they have learned- they will surely use there blogs once again to sprout new ideas- but for different subjects. "new ideas, will stem from the old". If they don't, I questioned whether they should be deleted to clean up the already cluttered world wide web. Like fallen leaves, should they be racked away and forgotten?

Blogs spur on new content, and the pile up of old ones has an unbelievable mass. People blog about their beliefs, about subjects they feel strongly about. They blog about whats going on in their life- as an online journal- and even schoolwork, and projects. What happens if they change their beliefs, or change their mind about something they once believed in so strongly- should those thoughts be deleted? Or should we take advantage of the fact that our minds once thought a certain way- but has grown. Look at it for what it once was, a beautifully coloured individual idea - then maybe take a look at what has happened in that time around you in the world, what was being shown to you through the media? through your family, your friends, and your lifestyle? How had it effected you directly?

David Weinberger used a similar metaphor but for folksonomy.

Folksonomy — A means of classifying and categorizing data on the web through collaborative efforts from the online community. This is more commonly known as (though not strictly synonymous to) ‘tagging’. ( Sixthings 1)

In his analogy he stated "that we want complexity - we want to find the answers ". To relate this to my metaphor, I would like to think that if someone wanted complexity and is reading one of your old posts- they would take the time to pay attention to dates, as well as other content and maybe explore some of your newer ideas as well as the old.














<--- And a beautiful flower I am.


1. "A Quick Web 2.0 Glossary." SixThings. 24 Feb. 2006. SixThings. 26 Nov. 2007 .

A Good Scare, An Even Better Laugh

The Podcast;
On November 10th my group and I got together to quickly make a podcast. With Halloween just passed we had all been watching a bunch of scary movies- which made for a very interesting topic choice. We each wrote a short paragraph about areas of the school portraying them as a place with a haunting story that has to do with a boy named earnest. Katherine wrote about the room 666, Adam wrote about the elevator, Cara wrote about the rooftop, Vanessa wrote about the laundry room, and I wrote about the tunnel that connects S and R building. The script was really fun to write because the group all had very similar ideas, and very similar senses of humour, and because it had to do with horror and make-believe. We wanted to create a myth for the residence buildings to interest the students who live in residence. It’s thrilling to think about the place you living having a haunting persona. There was a couple times where we found it hard to stay on topic because our imaginations ran off with us.
Cara and Vanessa are smarter with technology so we let them do the recording for the podcast- although we were all present for the recording in case we felt like we needed any revising done. Then we put it into an mp3 in real podcast form.




Podcast Tour of Humber College Residence, formerly the Rexdale School for Boys

RECORDING SCRIPT (effects will be added to the real mp3)

Vanessa: There is one recorded fatality at the Rexdale School for Boys. His name was Earnest, and he was 13 years old. He lived in Room 666, and he was liked by all his peers. He was discovered in his room slumped over his bureau with his history textbooks open. Cause of death: Homework Overload.

Cara: We’re here now at the Rexdale School for Boys today, now known as Humber North College Residence, where we are going to be leading a tour. Please stay with us as we venture through the tunnel that has an unknown history to the students who live here now.

Vanessa: The tunnel, which connects S building to the rest of the residence, was built over a fire pitt which students would use to burn all of their work at the end of the school year. To this day, some students say that they can feel what they can only describe as a hot spot as they pass through the tunnel.

The laundry room was used as the detention room back when it was a board school. Rumor has it that sometimes kids were made to stay in the detention room for over 24 hours. Some students would smuggle in small games to play to help pass the time. Ghosts are said to be seen in the laundry room and jacks have been found in the corner of the room.

Cara: Back when the building was for the Rexdale School for boys, the elevator was only supposed to be used by the cleaning maids and teachers. Some boys that were risky enough snuck into it regularly, just for the thrill of breaking the rules. Often they would ride up to the roof and look out over the landscape, usually a sunset or sunrise. Lets take a look up there now and find out what we can see.

Currently from the roof you can see the other residence buildings, the daycare centre, Hwy 27, and the Humber and Guelph-Humber buildings. At the time of the Rexdale School, most of this area wasn’t developed, so there was really nothing to see except a dirt path and a few trees. But the view wasn’t the only reason to go up to the roof. Professors used the roof as an illegal zone...they smoked and drank like there was no tomorrow. They assumed that no students would see them. However, Earnest and some friends went up to the roof one night, and they found their three teachers drunk, dancing to salsa music. They were horrified, so they ran back downstairs. It is still unknown if the teachers were aware of how their secret was exposed.

Vanessa: That’s it for the tour today. Please join our show next week when we will explore ...

Sight For Sore Eyes

Image Curation
The Image Curation project was tough to get started. We had a difficult time picking out what we wanted to do for our slideshow, but once we decided the ball got rolling and we finished within hours. We ‘danced’ around ideas like strange book titles, children’s drawings, and shapes but finally decided on the theme of glasses. We began our search for glasses and found that a lot of the search results that came up were of images of glasses or sunglasses on celebrities. I found even when I went online and looked for certain businesses photo’s they were all promoting sunglasses on celebrities and how to steal their style- like they were the most important and even the center of everyone’s daily life. Celebrities have been made into people whom we envy and want to be like. It’s almost as though, we are not seeing the world unless it is through their eyes, their beliefs, and values. My group and I got together the next day and we discussed how we all had noticed how glamorized their lifestyle has been made and used this as inspiration. So each of the members got together and searched for 10-15 pictures each with celebrities wearing glasses and making them look beautiful. At the end, we have the few very harsh, sad photos of children in third world countries wearing glasses that are made of paper, or straw and tape. This we thought examined a political aspect showing that just because you see something all the time portrayed in a certain way, doesn’t mean that it’s the only way that it can be presented.
I was having a hard time looking at these photographs from a semiotic point of view so I called up Cara and asked her for her assistance. She discussed a couple things with me including the notion of poverty being accepted in today’s society, as well as the obvious sexual appeal that is portrayed by the celebrities.
The pictures we chose were all of celebrities wearing glasses, or sunglasses and in every shot (correction, almost every shot) the celebrity wearing the glasses was shown in a very beautiful pose, with a huge smile or sexy smirk. The most sexual of the photographs were those used to actually sell the sunglasses. “When an image occurs in an advertisement, we assume that it is there to help sell a product, as by depicting an instance of someone enjoying possession and consumption of the product. Thus we have in these standard deployments of text and image the harmonious relations of explication (by text) and illustration (by image)” (Dillon 1). This only suggests just what we have been told and shown for years, sex sells. However, sex is not the only thing being used to sell glasses. Celebrities are shown wearing them –They are shown being strong, beautiful, rich, and everything that you want, or want to be. They use people’s envy to lure them into buying the glasses by showing them how happy they can be, how successful they could be, how beautiful... if they only bought the glasses. This is discussed in John Bergers Ways of Seeing.
The very end picture that Cara had found was that of a little boy wearing home-made glasses. They were bent out of shape, made of straw and tape. The boy looked as though he was a young refugee and he looked as though he did not have much. Much alike the celebrities shown he seemed to be very content, regardless of the fact that he may not have as much money or power. Unlike the celebrities we do not envy him, but because of his smile and what appears to be an unbroken spirit we accept him. His poverty is saddening but we also accept that because we have been a witness to poverty for years. There is no shock value in poverty anymore, and I feel less inclined to help out because I know there are hundreds of other people out there already doing so much for the poor. We see it every day in our own country (there are families that are too poor to even feed their own children). This is what is meant by poverty being accepted in today’s society.
Here is our slideshow;
(to be added)

Dillon, George L. "Art and the Semiotics of Images: Three Questions About Visual Meaning." 1 Dec. 2000. Washington University. 24 Nov. 2007 .

Lisa Goulet; Serious Activist with a Loud Message

Activist Project
In the beginning we had huge hopes and giant goals for our activist project including an overnight sleep/walk like the children in Northern Uganda, and three or more screenings of the documentary Invisible Children which is what inspired our Activist Project. When my group and I found out that booking the common room was going to take more time and effort than we had available we brainstormed for some new ideas on how to get the word out. We decided on the pay-it forward approach just like the three boys who had made the documentary Invisible Children. Each member of my group had made a replica of the DVD and showed it to at least one individual. We would then leave them with the DVD in hopes that they would burn a copy of their own and let the word out. I personally wanted to show more than one person so I made 6 copies and chose carefully who I would show it to. I brainstormed who I knew would not only be interested in viewing the documentary (so I wouldn’t bore them beyond any belief, I wanted their full attention) but I paid close attention to the type of person they were and how likely they were to pass on the message. The chosen where both my younger sisters, there is no one more like myself than the people I am closest with. To be able to show them I went home for the weekend and sat them down. Emily 16, and Danielle Goulet 14, were my first test subjects. We viewed the documentary later in the evening as I thought the timing was the most appropriate (not to early that they would be too tired and uninterested, not after lunch when they may be feeling full and groggy, and defiantly not before supper when we would all be starving to death. Although, I thought it may help them relate to the subjects in the documentary, I am not that cruel.) Their reactions were what I had expected, Emily the sentimental cried her eyes out and Danielle the serious talked about how unfair it seemed. They both spoke about how they felt they were extremely lucky to have been not only born into the country they were born into but the family. We are pretty well off and they realized how much we have been taking advantage of the fact that we’ve never had to work for money or food the way the children and adults of Northern Uganda. The guilt felt was enough to bring us to tears and silence. Danielle was the first to speak up “It’s weird, I would have never even thought about people in Africa in that way- I’ve always separated the lifestyles of those overseas and those here. Just like the boys in the documentary asked, I want to know why”.
The second group of people I showed was one of my best friends from Goderich whom I have been best friends with since I was in second grade Belinda Carter, her boyfriend Justin and my boyfriend (now ex) Kevin were also present. The setting was a bit different as we were getting together for a few drinks and so we were all a bit more heartfelt. The guys were not too much help, as they did not have much to say- but Belinda as always, was anything but a letdown. Although we all felt bad for them, and had sympathy she opened up an argument I never even thought of. “Would the people in Northern Uganda even know it was wrong to be starving, wrong to be in these constant fights or wrong to be uneducated had Americans, Canadians, or any other first class country gone over there and told them it was not right? Or would they think of it as life, think that is how we are supposed to live?” Her point made me think. I would like to believe that in a way life for them may have been better had we not interrupted their lifestyles so they could come to terms with it. However, I do not believe that love for your family members, and the need for food and water could ever be thought of as a good thing whether you know differently or not. If they lost someone close to them or in their family they will still miss them, because the unconditional love still exists.
I had one CD left. I thought long and hard about who I wanted to show it to. I then remembered that two of my newer friends that lived in residence had both once lived in Africa, Sarah West and Hector Mateer. I called them up and asked if they had at most an hour to spare out of their days and sure enough like any good friend the response I got was “anything for you Lisa Goulet”. Thirty minutes or so we met up and I showed them the video. After a couple moments of silence I asked what they thought. Both agreed it was possibly the saddest thing in the world, but they simply could not relate. They told me not all of Africa is like that. Parts of it have more beauty than they have ever seen anywhere else they have been in the world. They told me about all the good they have in their culture and how strongly Africans believe in their religions. They told me about the fun things that happened there, and they were slightly saddened that videos of all the starving children, and beaten people are being shown because it puts a bad name to the country. It makes people scared and too uncomfortable to go there and that affects the country’s economy in a bad way. Although, they appreciated the fact that there are people trying to help the ugly parts of the country and help out where it is needed. They agreed that overall the kids who made the documentary are doing a wonderful thing. “I just want for the world to understand there is more to Africa than death and poverty. Maybe one day, even in the bad parts, it will be like that.”
I asked them if they had any ideas how I could send the word out further more and they just told me to think of all the means of communication I have nowadays that we never had before and to take advantage of it. Brilliant! Immediately I accessed Google and searched Invisible Children to see if I could find the Documentary online as I remembered it was when I viewed the documentary the first time. When I found it I added the link into an email and wrote a short little spiel about why I would like them to take the time to view the documentary, and what I was sending it to them for. I sent this e-mail to everyone on my entire e-mail list which includes more than 300 people. I got a 35% response statistic which is amazing. That means at least 100 people viewed and responded! Responses varied from “That is the saddest thing I have ever seen” to “What can I do”. I was more than happy to let anyone who was interested about the invisible children website which has more than enough information and donation tools ex. purchasing a bracelet made by the Ugandans.
Overall, I know that I was successful in getting the word out. I may not have raised any money for their cause (which I know was not part of the project – I just had bigger dreams), but I raised a lot of awareness. Before I wrote this I called up the 7 people that I showed personally and asked if they had shown the DVD to anyone else. My sisters had their entire dance class come over to their house including a few of their close friends and watched it for their weekly “Monday Night Movie Night”. Belinda gave the DVD to her parents, because they are really into helping out with world issues. And Hector and Sarah did not do anything, slightly disappointing, but expected. I am very glad we chose the approach we did because I feel I got to more people than I would have had we only done screenings. I feel this is a unique way of getting the word out because it isn’t exactly mass media; however, I used several means of mass communication and mass media to get the word out so in a way it is.