Media
Personal Definition
Media used to be a form of showing entertainment and news to people, mostly through newspapers, radios, or televisions. People used to gather around at a friend’s house to listen to the radio, for example the fireside chats that FDR conducted to keep the citizen informed and entertained. And when televisions came out, people could barely afford one, so they too gathered together to enjoy watching movies. Back then, those were some of the biggest examples for media, but nowadays, any means of communicating, or getting entertained, serves as an example of media, which includes cellphones and computers. Today one can buy the newest smartphone and download all the apps needed to watch movies and sport events, for example Netflix or ESPN. Families used to sit in their living rooms enjoying a movie together that both the parents and the children liked. But now, most of the kids sit locked up in their room on their computers, their brain shut down and their eyes focused on the movie that was just playing on their screen.
Media Literacy now means knowing all the newest movies that just came out, or knowing all the newest apps that just became popular, and immediately downloading them. To be media literate means to keep up with the newest forms of entertainment. For me it means being able to read a book and being sucked into the world, picturing the story in your mind as you read it, and not being able to put down the book without finishing it. Being media literate means being able to gaze through the pages of a book without getting distracted by the screen of your phone, or your laptop.
Movies
Media
Books
Super Bowl precis
Trashcans are not Toilets?
The city in Louisiana is one of the biggest there, and one where the people can roam the bars, getting their drinks to go, and finishing them on the streets. Yet where there is liquid going in, there also has to be liquid coming out.
"I've been working at this bar for five years, yet people come in only to get their drinks to go or to use our restrooms", commented bartender Imanuel Philip Freely.
The streets are crowded with drunks running around and yelling, but the bars seem to be deserted. But the problem is not who drinks where, but who pees where. More and more trashcans are filled with urine than with actual trash.
"I've actually seen people put small part-a-potties around the street", said I.P. Freely, "but they all seem to go back to the trashcans". The mayor once approved to put more toilets around the streets, keeping the people from urinating in the trashcans, but apparently it has become a habit for the drunkards of New Orleans.
A new research team has developed trashcans that have a filtration system inside, helping the urine and trash stay separated. Mayor Conner Rap recently announced that these trashcans will be replacing the previous ones on Maine Street as an experiment, seeing how well it will work.
"I hope this will be a success," says Mayor C.Rap. And maybe it will, but it would have been cheaper to just outlaw public drinking.
The attempted assassination of John F. Kennedy
On his way to a speech in Dallas, Texas, former President John F. Kennedy was almost assassinated. He was waving in his car when Shawn Craig, one of his bodyguards, and also a former soldier in the U.S. Special Forces, saw a flash from one of the windows of the Texas School Book Depository. That flash reminded him of a flash from the scope of a sniper, so he rushed to the President’s side just in time for the shot to go off. The bullet hit Craig in the back, penetrating his lung, and the second shot hit the driver in the neck, killing him immediately. The car was rushed to the hospital, where they arrived just in time for Craig’s life to be saved, only for him to die a week later due to the trauma he received. The shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, was arrested a little later after his falling out with a police officer. Before he could be tried in court, Oswald was killed on the way to jail while he was still under interrogation. Oswald was part of a cult named Cedar, which was a group of men who believed in a country led by the people, without a leader. Kennedy tried to hunt down the remaining members of the cult, in order to achieve his revenge for the fallen Craig who saved his life. Two months after his attempted assassination, Kennedy believed that he had exterminated that cult and that he could finally give the family of Shawn Craig peace. In April of 1964, Jacqueline Kennedy almost got killed when her car exploded in front of her house, leaving her with only a few scratches and bruises. She got a message in the mail the next day that was obviously directed towards her husband, saying that he hasn’t exterminated them all yet. John Kennedy went on a crusade in order to eradicate this cult once and for all, ignoring the presidential matters that were at hand. While he was not paying attention, Raoul McCain, a distant cousin of Oswald, infiltrated the White House by receiving a job as part of the Secret Service. In May of 1964, when the President was reviewing some documents, McCain stabbed him in the side of the neck, penetrating his carotid artery and killing him within seconds. Kennedy was found minutes later, put the murderer has already escaped by then. Raoul McCain was arrested only 24 hours later after the President’s security detail found out that he was the last person seen inside the Oval Office. He was put on trial after just a week and sentenced to death, but before that the people wanted to know why he committed that atrocious crime. McCain only answered with a simple sentence saying that he just finished the job his cousin couldn’t complete. It was revealed only 40 years later that the murder was planned by the leader of the cult, a man by the name of Lyndon B. Johnson.
I Want To Break Free
The book, 1984, portrays a Dystopian society in which every single individual has been brainwashed by a government, called the Party, and only shows loyalty to those who are leaders of the Party. Yet there is the one person who decides to go against the Party by himself out of petty personal reasons. He wishes that all the people of the country known as Oceania would become free and rebel so that they don’t have to live under a totalitarian government. Winston, the main character, has had a different view of the Party as long as he could remember. He tried to break free from their hold throughout the entire story, for example by writing in a diary or fornicating with a woman, which was against the law. This song represents the determinism of Winston to go against the Party and break free from them, having his own thoughts and actions. Queens sings about how one shouldn't cling to something else and be dependent on it, to be able to live on their own. This would be a good theme song for the movie adaptation of the 1984 book because at the beginning it shows how Winston tried to stay independent.
Lyrics:
I want to break free
I want to break free
I want to break free from your lies
You're so self satisfied I don't need you
I've got to break free
God knows, God knows I want to break free
I've fallen in love
I've fallen in love for the first time
And this time I know it's for real
I've fallen in love yeah
God knows God knows I've fallen in love
It's strange but it's true
I can't get over the way you love me like you do
But I have to be sure
When I walk out that door
Oh how I want to be free baby
Oh how I want to be free
Oh how I want to break free
But life still goes on
I can't get used to living without living without
Living without you by my side
I don't want to live alone hey
God knows got to make it on my own
So baby can't you see
I've got to break free
I've got to break free
I want to break free yeah
I want, I want, I want, I want to break free
Reflection
At the beginning of the semester we started talking about how social media influences our everyday life as well as our professional life. It helped a lot considering that it is actually something that we use in our lives way too often. We also reflected on how our actions online can stay there permanently, and since we are young we tend to post unnecessary and stupid stuff, which is going to be stuck with us and might prevent us from having a future. We also learned how to write a précis, but personally I still think that those are useless. In the second unit of our media literacy class we talked about satires, which is basically making fun of somebodies work or creating your own comical work. We also watched the movie V which is a representation of how our society is trying to control the people through fear. In the last unit we talked about Dystopias, which is a place that is led by unpleasantness and destruction. We read a book that was frighteningly accurate on how our community was developing itself to become a country led by fear and figureheads that control our every move. This class differed from previous literature classes by actually teaching us about today’s literature as well as today’s problems with our society. We also read books and well as articles or other work that actually fit with the topic of the twenty first century, as well as the Generation Y. The few things that we actually read in this class have an application to our life today as well to our lives in the future. I think that this class was more educational on how to apply these things in our lives than any other language arts class I have had up to this point. One thing I can take away from this class would be to never underestimate how much our society is hiding form us, and how they can control us with what they have.