Survey Analysis

I don't think this survey is an accurate representation of our personality.

Initial Theories of Human Relationships

Human Relationships--possibly the most complex part of a humans life. There very complicated. If you over think a relationship, it can get awkward, but if you under think it, one person may not be happy. Not just a friendship, but a love relationship. People often try to conform to fit into a group or relationship. It is not who they really are and many times people are out of their comfort zones. I think a true relationship is where you can be yourself and the other person can be themselves. Where no one is judging you on what you do or say, and you're happy. Everybody wants affirmation, and when their in a relationship, they get that. "Yea I can bag that girl." "Yea me and my friends were at that party last night". Even if it's not beneficial to you, people want to feel important. When I go to my internship on Thursdays, I usually am folding napkins, or washing dishes. Clerical Kitchen work mostly. But the other day he asked if I wanted to help serve the food. It is a much harder and energy consuming job, but I was excited to be moving up in the rankings. Even though its harder, and I don't get paid, I was happy to be doing that.

HW 45 - More Big Thoughts on Schools

E.D. Hirsch Jr: Hirsch was born in the conservative town of Memphis Tennessee. A Yale graduate, he was very interested in how the human mind interpreted information. While most people think that in order to understand a text it must be easy to read, Hirsch argues, you must have sufficient background knowledge in order to really understand the text. In a study that Hirsch did at the University of Virginia, and then again at a Community College, he found out:
" Students at the University of Virginia were able to understand a passage on Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, while students at a community college struggled with it, apparently lacking basic understanding of the American Civil War."

HW 41 - Initial Internet Research on Schooling

Kremer, John. "The College Dropouts Hall of Fame". 2/23/10 .

In this article, John Kremer goes through the successful people that never went through complete schooling. There are celebrities, entrepreneurs. Rich people who are successful.
In my experiment, I want to find out if you can learn how to be successful better through life experiences, or through school. I feel like school doesn't teach you how to be successful, it just teaches you how to move on to the next step, but you have to figure out what to do when you get there. Maybe the elementary school teaching is necessary. Adding, Subtracting, telling time, but maybe not. Can you learn that from just being out in the world? Do you need the social pressure and put down of school? Do you need to constantly stretch your brain to stay focused in class to the point where your completely worn out by the end. School is

HW 40 Interviews

Question: What do you look forward to in school?
Katherine: Seeing my friends. Socializing.

Question: What about learning and getting a higher education for yourself? Does that matter?
Katherine: Well I don't know. Secretly on the inside it matters but I would never show it.

Question: Why would you never show it?
Katherine: Because it's not cool. Its "wack".

In HW 33 I stated that when "there is a hero who's cool, the person is usually who you would not expect to be cool, because he/she is lower class, or different." It's not cool to do well in school. But people need to do it to succeed. I think that school is something that we need to take seriously. I obviously haven't done a good job of that so far, and I realized a little too late, but if you do well in school it gives you opportunities later in life.


Question: Do you think that being couped up in this building for 6,7,8 hours a day in the prime of our lives is a bad thing?
Ian: Yes. From my own experience in school, we're told what to learn but we have no opinion on what we want to learn. Our own curiosity is really thrown to the ground. We're not being taught stuff to know we're being trained stuff to do. My question to your question is this: Would you rather learn about 'Knights and Knaves', or a social problem/having fun like doing things that you want to do. I believe that people -- children really, are really naturally curious, but the curiosity is killed in school.

Question: What do you look forward to in school?
Ian: Really just the people stuck in it. I'm not coming to school, I'm coming to you. I'm coming to the people. not the pen, like I'm talking to you right now fanning can say

HW 33

I think that coolness is a distraction from the reality of life. I also think coolness is a myth. In high school at least. Think about it, all the rich and successful men and women of the world are "cool", but in high school, most of the "cool" kids are not rich, or successful. a lot of them actually are struggling with school, but isn't coolness about making everything look effortless? There are many contradictions in the world of cool. People state that coolness is about having money, but In almost all movies and books etc. where people there is a hero who's cool, the person is usually who you would not expect to be cool, because he/she is lower class, or different. We see that in school too. When we interviewed Chris about his clothing, he had on a 4000 dollar outfit, but he lived in the projects.

Informal Research Internet Magazines TV Shows

http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/GB-EN/Consumer-Products-and-Services/Mobile-Phones/ci.Motorola-DEXT-GB-EN.services
“Meet” The new Motorola DEXT. Slogan: "Take Your Entire Social Life With You". Or "The first phone with social skills". Go to the homepage, and you will see a very encouraging promotional blurb: "Meet the fully customisable home screen that's as unique as you are. Your Facebook™, MySpace and Twitter happenings are right there, along with your emails, messages, news and favorite apps, and widgets. All just the way you like them." If a phone screen can be just as unique as you are, how unique are you?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1CDZ408rzM
The protagonists entire social life is racing to get to him through this phone, but the one that really matters to him appears at the end. His “girlfriend” sends him a text and all of a sudden she appears. The consumer can do everything that in other instances he would do in person, miraculously on his phone! The world of technology is providing another world where we can do everything we want on our phones. There would be no more awkward conversations, because you will never actually be in a face-to-face conversation. This technological life that people are living is not a life. It works for you, it thinks for you. It is your entire social life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsE0g-8CDQo
In an HP computer commercial, in which the person advertising it is Jay-Z, a famous rapper, the commercial ironically provides revealing social commentary. Jay-Z states that his "whole life is on this thing". As stupid as that may sound, I can't help but agree. What would we really do without our computers? Our Phones? Our Facebooks? We would be out of the loop. Our social life… Gone. Until of course we get a new one the next day or two. People have lost the ability to live without these things. Facebook has just reached 350 million users. If Facebook was a country, it would be the third largest country in the world. It would be larger than the United States. That’s scary.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/article763859.ece
A kid’s relationship to their parents is one of the most fundamental and important things in a person’s life. One’s parents are the closest people to them. You're supposed to be able to talk to them, and tell them things. They should know about your life -- they created it! So when things like Myspace, and Facebook came out, you can see how our generation went downhill. Kids stopped talking to their parents, and started social networking as a way of therapy. Telling basically complete strangers (people you have met maybe once) about all of your problems (a Status), and seeing what people have to say about it.
Patrick White interviews 3 parents whose kids all have Facebook. All three of families said that their relationships with their kids have changed. Two of the three families said that their relationships are worse. One mother even says she thinks that her daughter's generation is losing the ability to socialize in person.

Feed
The book Feed by M.T. Anderson is a novel about a world in which a tiny chip called “The Feed” is stored into people’s brains. “The Feed” had features like “M-Chat”, which was basically texting/Iming from the brain. You never had to talk out loud, you just needed to M-chat someone. I kept making these parallels and connections. The feed itself was the Internet. You could look things up, buy things, and even get high or drunk, from the comfort of your own brain, never having to go anywhere