Metaphors

The main thing that I realized is that most of my metaphors involve technology as a metaphor for humans. I think that this could have a huge impact on the way that we think and feel about ourselves. We have begun to look at ourselves as machines and this mean that we’ve quit paying attention to many human tendencies. For example, cooking used to be a gift that many women possessed because it was necessary to cook for their families. Now, women are working alongside the men and their families have to fend for themselves when it comes to meals. Many of my friends in high school had this experience.

Another way technology affects the way we think and feel about ourselves is that it eliminates emotion from our lives. In today’s world, it is becoming less and less common to express emotion in public. People are holding in their emotions and finding it harder to express their feelings.

Technology is also making society a less social one. People no longer need to meet with people personally to do business, they simply e-mail or talk on the phone. This will change public policy eventually because people will communicate a lot less. People will become less social and they won’t be able to deal with people as well. Problems will go unsolved and laws will be broken.

Sense of Self

I think that in today’s world, the media uses images for pretty much everything. You can’t pick up a newspaper or read a book without seeing some sort of images. A newspaper – something that is supposedly text-based is just packed with images.

Television, though, is probably the worst type of media we have for using images. We flip through the channels and can’t help but notice thin, beautiful, young women and muscular, handsome men. This has a huge impact on our body image. Young girls think that they are supposed to look like the women they see on television, and young boys feel the same way. When they get to be teenagers and realize that they will probably never look that way, it has a huge impact on self-esteem. People wonder why so many young people have eating disorders. All they have to do is turn on their television to find out.

I’m not saying that all we have to do is censor images to correct problems with body image, because it wouldn’t completely solve the problem. However, young children need to know that beauty is only skin-deep and that not everybody needs to look like the people they see on TV to be beautiful.

Virtual Rape

After reading the debate between Dibbel and Miller, present an argument about whether a person can or cannot be raped in cyberspace. How are sexually violent crimes like rape connected to a person's identity beyond the physical body?

I think that in a sense, a person can be raped in cyberspace. Rape is more or less a mental crime committed through a physical act...people regularly participate in the physical act, it's only through mentally not wanting to participate that it becomes a crime. So if a person does not want to participate in the act, whether in real life or virtual reality, rape is still rape. As seen in the article, the woman had emotional trauma after she was raped in cyberspace. She was less effected by the rape online than she would have been had the physical act actually been committed against her. Being raped in cyberspace has a great deal less of an emotional effect, but the crime of rape was still committed.

I think that it would be much harder to punish anybody in virtual reality than in real life, because a person can simply log into the chatroom with a new account and nobody would ever know the difference. I don't think that a case like this would make it into a court of law anytime soon, and it'd be very hard to actually prove who committed the crime.

Turkle and MOOs

In Turkle's essay, she argues that identities can very easily be changed in a MOO. When playing in a MOO, she says that different personalities can be cycled through very quickly. Being online and anonymous allows us to become anybody we want to be, regardless of our bodies and personalities.

In chat rooms, I find that this is pretty much the case. You can switch from one personality to the next with the click of a few buttons. In real life, there's no way this is possible. It's kind of like Blade Runner and those machines you can use to change your emotions. In cyberspace that's pretty much what you do - dial up an emotion. You can be anybody you want to be in cyberspace because it's just a bunch of words; nothing is physical.

Module 1 Assignment 2

When I talk to different sets of people I tend to speak differently, or "speak another language." When I'm talking to my friends and family, I tend to speak my mind and say how I honestly feel about things. They know me well, so they would know if I was lying or not being honest. Also, I don't feel the need to come off as something I'm really not; I don't need to impress them. I know them well and trust them, so I can confide my true feelings in them.

When I'm talking to peers that I don't know well, I tend not to say much sometimes. The same goes for when I'm talking to professors or other adults. I don't know how they feel about me, and I don't know them that well so I stay quieter than I normally am.

When I talk to my friends, I feel like I am truly myself. I say pretty much anything that's runs through my mind. When I talk to others, I still feel that I am myself, just much more reserved.

The Monster's Stigma

When creature in Frankenstein comes to life, he thinks that he is normal - just like everybody else. Then, he is rejected by his creator so he ventures out into society. Everybody is scared of him, but he doesn't know why. When he starts reading, he reads about monsters. He identifies with them, so he starts to act like them, even though he knows that's not what society expects from him. The literature he reads and the actions of others combined are what turns the creature into a monster.

I think that reading and watching movies does make people feel excluded in some ways. For example, when you read a romance novel or watch a chick flick, you realize that the things in those stories aren't going to happen to you. This makes you feel excluded. Or if you read a book about something you have always wanted to do you'll feel excluded from that.

In Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Pip first achieves consciousness of himself as a self when he is talking to the poor man in the graveyard. He steals from his sister and her husband to feed the homeless man. He feels awful about it because society tells him not to steal - that it's immoral and wrong. This is similar to the monster's situation in Frankenstein because they go against the expectations of society.

Frankenstein...

The creature in Frankenstein is born with a good heart, but he is treated horribly by other people because of his bad looks. In the beginning, he can't communicate and he can't understand anything going on around him. Victor flips out on him and runs away from his own creation. Everybody else does the same thing; they see the creature and think monster. They cannot get past his outer appearance. People are projecting their own fears onto the creature. He becomes a monster in their eyes because that is what people fear deep down inside themselves. Little do they know that if they tried to be peaceful, a whole lot of pain and torture could have been avoided.

This is the same way that many countries are seen in the eyes of U.S. citizens. If we see a person from Iraq walking down the street, we instantly think terrorist. However, we're not looking beyond the surface. We need to realize that the people of Iraq are peaceful, it's a select few that want to bomb the United States.

Another thing that we project our fears upon is people with AIDS or other transmittable diseases. We frown upon these people sometimes, but we need to realize that they have good hearts. While their outward appearance may disintigrate, their hearts stay the same and we shouldn't project our fears onto them.

Or how about first impressions in general? In school, there was always this one boy that I thought was really feminine...and i thought he was a geek. I never gave him the time of day...i had 80 kids in school with me...and i still wouldn't give him the time of day. Then high school rolled around and it turns out he was in most of my classes. Then I ended up tutoring him in a math class. By the end of the first semester we were best friends and pretty much inseparable. He's probably the best guy friend I have from high school. At first, I projected my ideas onto him, but then I realized that I just needed to give him a chance...that he was completely normal and a really a great guy.