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I’ve decided to keep writing this blog (like a few other classmates that I’ve noticed), since it has been an encouraging blog for me (being forced to write for marks, and all). Just thought I’d let anyone who wants to continue reading this know…

To all those who are reading this, good luck with all of your exams!

dictionary.com has taught me to knowingly search for them. (haHA)

One of my roommates helped me put it into perspective a little. She had a friend who spent a lot of his time building up characters and creating characters that he could sell on the internet. Apparently he was able to make a decent amount of money selling these characters which were worthy of the higher level ‘guilds’ talked about in the article. But this still made me ask how the people buying the characters can afford to spend from 4:00 until 12:00, like one of the higher level guilds required, playing the game, just in order to remain worthy of the guild, or like the Soprano’s metaphor, as a ‘good earner.’

I definitely understand how it can be an alternative community for people to socialize and network, and how it is a fantasy where people can experience success, form social bonds, and create extended social networks, I just don’t understand how people can identify so strongly with these games. I found this article very enlightening into what the world of ‘gamers’ is like, especially because the most gaming that I do now, is playing games on addictinggames.com for 20 minutes every once in a while.

I love it.

The movement for equality among sexual orientations, and alternative genders, hasn’t had as long of a history, and is thus still at a stage where a unified identity in the media is helpful. While like the apparent disdain for grouping different ethnicities into unified identities, it would not be useful for ethnicity to be seen as a single unified identity. I think that there will be a point where queer theory comes to be the popular view in the movement for social equality in the Gay and Lesbian communities, it will just have to wait until the movement progresses to a point where the general society accepts Gay and Lesbian people more equally.

Bowie rules, and this album rules even more!

I saw him recently on a British tv show called Extras which lasted two seasons. It fills my heart…

Why would they not use stereotypes? If it is working, and they are selling products to the ‘stereotypes,’ why would they stop doing it? Abby Friedrich touches on the fact that advertisements are a reflection of our society, but she contradicts herself with her final message: “Until people realize that the physical appearances seen in magazines and on television are completely out of anyone’s reach, we will all continue to strive with a false sense of hope.” It isn’t the images in magazines and television that people are striving for, those are just reflections of our society. A sociologist at our school corrected me quite importantly once when I was saying that advertisements cause things (patriarchy, racism, etc.) in society; it is society that causes, or creates, advertisements. We are racist (North American culture; not all of us, of course), we are sexist, we are all the bad things that we see in our advertisements that make us sick; is it not that we must first “fix” (however we do that) the problems in our society before we can stop striving for “a false sense of hope?” When the issues, which are reflections of the way we live, are solved, would it not be logical that the evil advertisers will stop exploiting our society’s weaknesses?

Now I know, the article, All of your insecurities wrapped up in a thirty second spot, is aiming at ending those problems, or weaknesses of our society, or culture, but I think that it is aiming its weapons at the wrong target. The advertising industry is made to do what it does; it is supposed to exploit us. Is it ever possible to “minimiz[e] the threat [of] advertising and the commercial culture that has spawned it,” (from Advertising at the edge of the apocalypse) or does it need to be discarded entirely? I don’t believe that reforming a system that is made to do exactly what it is doing, or molding it into something that we could say is acceptable, will work. You can’t make a shark stop eating other fish, without serious repercussions to the shark (this sentence, indeed, was approved by a biologist).