Audience Text

This blog targets my ideal audience. Though my main argument in my review of lit and research is that television can jumpstart a lot of negative things in children's lives, what I really want to emphasize is that parents need to be watching their own kids, not just relying on television to do it because this is what television can do without the added influence that a parent is supposed to give. Television will always be "This is awesome. This is what your life could be like if you had this or did this" but parents are supposed to be the counteracting ingredient in that. Parents should be "This is reality. This is what will really happen. This is real life." But if children are babysat by their television, then they don't get that.

This blog may or may not cover that exact subject. But it does suggest things that will make your home safer for your child and ideas for activities and such. You can tell it's targeted towards parents because, well, it says so. Aside from being called parenting-blog, it also has articles with titles such as How To Avoid Mommy Burnout. They use language that assumes that you're experienced with things such as child rearing, instead of explaining more minor details. They assume you understand the experiences behind things like "teething", etc. and don't really elaborate.

Inspiring Video

This video is the one I chose for one that inspired me. The song is god-awful, actually. But I'm a huge Glee fan and it's usually weird to watch mash-ups like this. I know that the scenes are sometimes actually ridiculous when they're in places where they should be sad, but this one doesn't do that for me. It actually, literally, broke my heart. It has nothing to do with making an argument, not really (it's more of a 'what if' than anything.) and absolutely nothing to do with my subject but its so heart wrenching and well put together (though I maintain that the song is awful). It doesn't even give me ideas. It just makes me want my video to be good enough to share Youtube with it.

Unethical Use

I don't really remember using anything from the internet unethically. I'm sure I've done it, it's just not really something that I did and was like "Oh, I used this unethically" or set out to do. I think current copyright laws are a little too rigid for our current culture. That's not to say that people who publish their things online shouldn't have rights and be protected, but I think it's a little tedious to have to go hunting for sources and permissions for things you find on Google. If I just need a picture of a puppy, it shouldn't take me 3 hours of hunting and requesting and emailing to officially use it. Thankfully, there are a lot of allowances made for students and I haven't really encountered anything that irritating yet. However, I'm sure a lot of people have. Maybe there should be blocks and filters regarding copyright on search sites. That way, if I use a source, I can be sure that I'm not using something that someone copyrighted and didn't want me to use.

Since We're Talking About It...#5

This annotation went much better, I think. I had a lot of trouble writing mine up last year and I really had no trouble at all this year. Which may mean that I still didn't do it right, but still! It wasn't as bad.

Professor Lackey pointed out that I may have had trouble annotating last year because all of my sources said the same thing. So this time, I've tried to choose a lot of radically different sources. I picked some issues that have impacted health and wellness--obesity, violence education--and found some resources on how they impact children and how they impact society. I think this way, I can end up with a wider variety of information than before.

Annotation

Harris, Jennifer L., John A. Bargh, and Kelly D. Brownell. "Priming Effects of Television Food Advertising on Eating Behavior." Health Psychology 28.4 (2009): 404-13. Print.

This article details the results of two experiments performed on a group of children and a group of adults. Each group was shown ads detailing certain types of food and afterwards, their eating habits were monitored. With both the group of adults and the group of children, they were prompted to eat no matter what type of food was advertised for them, when given a general snack food. But when they were allowed to chose their food, the more sugary and fatty the commercial seemed to be, the more sugar and fat the snacks chosen had. There seems to be a pretty strong influence from food advertising on how people choose to eat (such as what and how often they eat).

The source seems reputable. It was published in journal regulated by the APA, so unless it was an April Fools edition, there has to be some merit to the study. It also means that the APA probably monitored or approved or were somehow involved with the study in its early stages. It may be a little bias, though. They had the participants watch tv either with food, or had them watch the advertisements and then offered them food to choose from. But they didn't leave it up to the participants whether or not they wanted food at all without food in front of them. It's entirely possible that the advertisement had nothing to do with it and it was the food itself that appeared in between the experiment and the recorded result that influenced the participants.

This resource is one of the 3 main points I want to hit with how television influences people. If advertising influences unhealthy eating habits, which leads to obesity, which leads to all kinds of health problems and disability and a general decline in wellness, then food advertising has a direct link to the decline. If we start with this at a young age, these children whose parents allow television to babysit them never have a chance at a healthy life if this is what they're taught is "cool" or "good".

Since We're Talking About It...#4

So just as a preliminary to tomorrow's class, I thought I'd google television and how it's related to childhood development.

I got over 30,000,000 results.

I have no idea what to do with this. Maybe it's because I'm tired and just off of the heels of writing a paper for my midterm in another class, but my brain is shot just looking at that number. Professor Lackey gave us some direction but hopefully tomorrow will provide a little more.

Right now? I really need a nap, before the number 32,900,000 makes my brain explode.

In-Class Discussion #5

In class, we've been talking a lot about annotated bibliographies and our review of literature. I can't help but think about the last annotated bibliography I wrote, during my senior year of High school. It was about my resources for my senior project, an analysis on Edgar Allen Poe's influences on Steven King. Most of my resources all said the same things, biographies on each writer and the books I was using to compare them.

The result was really, honestly atrocious.

I got a horrible grade on it, and mostly because she said there wasn't enough there for her to evaluate. But she didn't tell me what she wanted to evaluate in the first place and I was really frustrated by that.

In short? I know Professor Lackey has given us very clear guidelines for this project, but I'm still pretty nervous about it. It can't possible be worse than last time, at least.