In today's modern world, different types of mediums are used to get information across quickly. The days of waiting for three days or more for information are long gone. We can access news right from our fingertips! We’re able to view videos to tell us what’s happening, look at photos, or read pieces of text. However, sometimes the information we’re getting can be bias or taken out of context. And sometimes, twisting someone's words to get your point across can have nasty consequences. One of the most common and arguably old fashion ways to get information is by reading it. Whether it be in a book or in the newspaper, text is all around us. In A Mighty Long Way by Carlotta Walls LaNier, you’re given an up close and personal experience to what she went through during her struggle with integration and the racist people who didn’t want her there. She experiences mobs that scream slurs at her, bullying, and even a bombing. She writes, “The scene felt surreal. With everyone screaming and jeering at once, their words sounded muddled…” This just shows how text can get your point across. Although, unless you’re an amazingly talented writer, it can be hard to show true and raw emotions. Carlotta’s able to give background information to show more description of the events going on such …show more content…
as when she writes, “Just who were these people? Were they the women who turned up their noses and murmured nasty words at Mother and me on the city bus? Were they the white customers I saw from time to time with Big Daddy at meatpacking houses downtown? Were they my white neighbors?” It gives you background to show the kind of people she’s encountered during her struggle. For other writers, something like this could be hard. A pictures worth a thousand words, right?
Maybe so but those “words” might come across the wrong way if you snap the photo at the wrong time. The perfect photo would show everyone's emotions and be in perfect context, which can be hard when things are moving so fast like theywere when the mobs crowded Little Rock Central High School. A photo of Elizabeth Eckford was taken the day she tried to enter the high school. It shows her holding her books tightly to her chest with mobs behind her. You can see many clearly enraged faces of teenagers and even adults. It’s very engaging and shows the viewer just how scary the situation was for her. This, however, is something some photos can fail to
do. Video is the newest form of sharing information. It’s known for being highly engaging and an easy way to show emotion. Like many other mediums, words can be twisted to the presenters benefit. In John Chancellor's news report about the events at Little Rock, he says, “Therefore I think it is very unlikely that they will try to enter the building tomorrow.” In news, it’s usually a general rule not to mention your opinions during a neutral report. Another negative is sometimes clips can be edited and taken out of context, which can end in many negative ways. Media is something that’s very important. Without it, we wouldn’t have any way of knowing what's going on in our world. But it also sometimes leaves viewers not knowing what to believe and what’s true. The key to watching the news, or reading it, is to reflect and thinking for yourself at the end. It’s important to consider both sides of a story. Even if it seems one way, it could be another.
Through manipulation and lies, media manages to modify objective news into biased news in order to convince the public of what the media wants them to believe. The article, “How the Media Twist the News”, by Sheila Gribben Liaugminas discusses the major influence that news has on readers based on their choice of stories and words. “How the Media Twists the News” has borrowed from multiple other texts such as the books like Public Opinion and Liberty and News, news magazine writers such as Ruderman, and news networks like CBS through Bias, A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News and CNN to make her arguments valid and prove that the news is biased and that it does influence readers significantly because of it.
Many websites are known for being radically one-sided in their news coverage. In “The Things People Say” Kolbert says that left-leaning readers know, for example, that if they go to the Huffington Post or to AlterNet they will find stories that support their view of the world. Right-leaning readers know to go to the Drudge Report or to Newsmax to find stories that fit their preconceptions. This issue is all throughout social media as well. On Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc. you will find this biased information. A lot of times, we click and read things that gravitate towards our thinking and shun the rest of the information that does not. In this sense we become secular to opinions that strengthen our own and disregard all
I glance amusedly at the photo placed before me. The bright and smiling faces of my family stare back me, their expressions depicting complete happiness. My mind drifted back to the events of the day that the photo was taken. It was Memorial Day and so, in the spirit of tradition my large extended family had gathered at the grave of my great grandparents. The day was hot and I had begged my mother to let me join my friends at the pool. However, my mother had refused. Inconsolable, I spent most of the day moping about sulkily. The time came for a group picture and so my grandmother arranged us all just so and then turned to me saying, "You'd better smile Emma or you'll look back at this and never forgive yourself." Eager to please and knowing she would never let it go if I didn't, I plastered on a dazzling smile. One might say a picture is worth a thousand words. However, who is to say they are the accurate or right words? During the 1930s, photographers were hired by the FSA to photograph the events of the Great Depression. These photographers used their images, posed or accurate, to sway public opinion concerning the era. Their work displayed an attempt to fulfill the need to document what was taking place and the desire to influence what needed to be done.
In “A Long Way Gone”, we follow a twelve-year-old African boy, Ishmael Beah, who was in the midst, let alone survived a civil war in Sierra Leone, that turned his world upside down. Ishmael was a kind and innocent boy, who lived in a village where everybody knew each other and happiness was clearly vibrant amongst all the villagers. Throughout the novel, he describes the horrific scenes he encounters that would seem unreal and traumatizing to any reader. The main key to his survival is family, who swap out from being related to becoming non-blood related people who he journeys with and meets along his journey by chance.
I chose “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly” by Johnathan Sofran Foer, and “Wake Up Call” by Megan McGuire. They have similar underlying themes and will be an interesting comparison. “Here We Aren’t, So Quickly” is about what seems to be a daydream about the future relationship between two lovers and how it evolves over the course of their adults lives. “Wake Up Call” is about the relationship between a girl and her parents as she grows up from adolescence in to young adulthood. .
Although I wasn’t in Mississippi during the ‘Freedom Summer’, I had a solid understanding of how life was during the ‘Freedom Summer’. This was years of racism and segregation towards the blacks in the US during the Civil Rights Movement. My aspect type was racism, and I learned of its impact on life through our analysis in the class of The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker, an epistolary novel about the lives of black people in rural dominated white racist Georgia during the 1920’s-50’s. Furthermore, we discussed Nelson Mandela’s Inaugural Speech in class, and how Mandela fought for Independence from the white racist government. With extra research of the Freedom Summer project launched by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), I learned enough to be able to write my written task. The text type that I chose was a blog written from a perspective of college student who went to Longdale, Mississippi as part of Freedom Summer and the impacts of racism on his visit. I chose a blog as my text type because I thought that this would be tremendously appealing. As during, the time of the Civil Rights there was no such thing as blogs due to the lack of advanced technology which we have today. Also, I believed that this would help me to expand on the aspect type of racism also the Civil Rights movement, in a different mechanism by mixing both events, of the past and technology of today. Furthermore, I used a blog, in order to inform and strengthen pervious knowledge (Civil Rights Movement) into a fresh approach (blog) which probably would pull the young people who use blogs. As a result of this, they would be interested in the text type, read it and then retrieve lost knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement.
In the second chapter of Lies My Teacher Told Me Lowen argues that electronic media has decisively and irriversibly changed the character of our environment. He believes that we are now a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are given form by televison not by the printed word. Loewen describes how discourse in America is now different from what it once was. Loewwen says discourse was once logical, serious, and rational and now under the governance of television it is shriveled and absurd. In addition, he writes about the definitions of truth and the sources in which the definitions come from. Loewen shows how the bias of a medium is unseen throughout a culture and he gives three examples of truth telling.
What’s all the ‘hype’ about this “media-controlled universe”? Cynthia L. Kemper writes in her article “Living in Spin” about how the twenty-first century has a corrupt sense of honesty. Her paper, published in “Communication World”, is generally a reaction to her findings about the new age style of communication. She bases it mostly on interviews and supports it by the many quotes weaved between her logic-based trails of thought. Appealing mostly to logos and pathos, she carries a conversational tone with her audience. This tone is abundant in rhetorical questions that she doesn’t attempt to answer. The main purpose of her article appears to be the ‘eye-opening’ factor. Kemper manages to provide a conscious effort to tell people how many different factors have affected the current generation’s ability to speak without ‘spinning’. She quotes the editor of slate, Michael Kinsley, in order to explain that “Spinning means describing a reality that suits your purposes. Whether it resembles the reality we all share is an issue that doesn't even arise”. Simply put, the author that begins her essay with a very intriguing question, “Have 21st Century Communicators Stopped Telling the Truth?”; refrains from clearly answering this very question throughout her work. In the article the author talks about the problems of people ‘coloring’ stories to make them more appealing. Modern day rules allow people to stretch the truth to sell products better among other things. She blames these ‘innovations’ in the world of communication to the new progresses in technology.
A good part of Outfoxed focuses on the company's blurring of news and commentary, how anchormen and reporters are encouraged to repeatedly use catch-phrases like "some people say..." as a means of editorializing within a supposedly objective news story; how graphics, speculation and false information are repeated over-and-over throughout the broadcast day until it appears to become fact, and in doing so spreads like a virus and copied on other networks. A PIPA/Knowledge Networks Poll points to glaring, fundamental misconceptions about the news perpetuated upon Fox viewers, versus information received from widely respected news-gathering organizations like NPR and PBS. Asked, for instance, "Has the U.S. found links between Iraq & al-Qaeda?" only 16% of PBS and NPR viewers answered "yes," but a frightening 67% of Fox viewers believed there had.
Have you ever found yourself eating some bittersweet chocolate? Well I have, right in my university class. Our professor handed the students a bag of chocolate so that we could have a taste of what bittersweet tasted like. Although, I hated how it tasted like, but when it was all gone and melted I had the strangest want for more. On the obvious side, bittersweet is a word that stands as it is and means exactly the way it stands, it can be used to identify a person’s experiences. For example, throughout the memoir A Long Way Home, Saroo’s journey is filled with bittersweet moments, from the first day he got lost to the day he was reunited with his family. In this essay I will show some examples of bitter sweet moments starting with him becoming
As the mind matures and grows, new opinions are formed with the help of the revolutionizing consciousness of humanity. The human conscious allows humanity to develop individually and gain unique cognitive patterns and thinking processes. However, these opinions can be manipulated by environmental sources, like the media. The media’s puppet strings can be used to influence the minds of the masses and control their overall thinking process. It takes away an individual’s freedom to think for themselves and form their own opinions. Manipulation is a key ingredient in attaining support for a side of an argument. News networks have this ability to twist the minds of their listeners and unconsciously force them to believe in their words. Two of the
Far North by Will Hobbs, published in 1996, is a book of adventure and suspense. A 15 year old boy named Gabe is on a plane in Canada with his peers to do some sight seeing. Unexpectedly, following some poor decisions, the plane crashes in the cold Canadian Northwest Territories . Gabe and the other two survivors need to do everything in their power to survive the harsh winter. Gabe is a brave and strong kid who has to face many trials and hardships to survive in his hero's journey. Throughout the story, he is called to adventure, meets a mentor, and faces trials along the way.
Many turn to social or media throughout their day to gain insight on activities and event that is going on in the world. The media does not have to report the truth so individuals may gain untruthful information and a cloudy perception. Individuals tend to turn to the media to gain an opinion about someone or something.
Everyone has expectations to uphold and often it can feel overwhelming to comply with them all. When one chooses not to comply to the expectations set by oneself or from others, it can be seen as an act of rebellion, foolish-thinking, or a failure to see what the future holds. Similarly, expectations that are too elevated towards others can result in a harsh confrontation with reality. In the novel, The Other Side of the Bridge, by Mary Lawson, the author develops the idea that one bearing too many expectations of others and of oneself can lead to developing distress and feelings of betrayal if the expectations are not met. The theme of expectations is developed using the character Ian, through the social expectations he encounters, familial
The introduction of the internet to modern society has brought about a new age of information relation. Since there is no longer a need to wait until the next print day, news from all over the world is available at a person’s fingertips within hours or even minutes of the event. With this advent of such easily accessible information, new problems for the news media have also arisen. Aside from potentially losing good economic standing because newspapers are no longer being purchased in the quantities they used to be, the credibility of the information itself is also put into question. No one would argue that credibility of news sources is unimportant, but there is a discrepancy in what takes precedence; economy and speed or getting the information out correctly at the first publishing by taking the time to make sure all facts are checked. The importance of having a system of checks on all information submitted is paramount. People trust what they read and believe it to be so without always questioning. If all information were to not be checked thoroughly, there would be instances where people read an article only for information included to be wrong and they go on believing such information. This can be very dangerous as misinformed people make misinformed decisions. With an increase in errors being made by citizen bloggers and even major publications, many are worried that journalistic ethics and credibility in the news media are being sacrificed in order to maintain swiftness in the news circuit and to retain personal profits. Though getting information to the masses quickly is a major part of the media’s importance, this should not mean that the credibility of that information being presented should be sacrificed for it...