12. Study! Study! Study!

'Clean Study Bag' by The Maste Shake Signal, licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

This week and all 2 weeks until he final exams I have got lots of think to do. I have a TLL101 presentation on tuesday, on thursday SPS101 quiz and ofcourse on saturday Mathematic 2. midterm. Next week ENG 101 presentation of a movie which called V for Vendetta and I have to write I-Blog paper too. Then final exams and also in-class essay are going to start.

11. Pub Quiz

This week we made a Pub Quiz, which was very entertaining and at the same time we can review what we did in this semester. The main purpuse of that quiz was to review part I think. The winner could improve the final grades but we lost=( Sonja asked many questions about our reading texts, blogging, due dates so we remember many significant points of the texts and the due dates of final essay and I-Blog paper=)

10.Television the plug-in drug

'The Suck' by Big Fat Rat, licenced under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic

Hi everyone
Last week one of group of our class members presented the Marie Winn's "Television the plug-in drug". I liked the slides and their designes. For example they used many diagrams for the researches and for to summurize the "rituals" part. Diagrams help audience to understand the subject easily.
The text was interesting but I don't agree with Marie Winn in some cases. There is a quote which is "if the child's home life is all right, parents need not worry about the effects of too much television watching" (Winn, 2002). That is really true. If everything allright and there is no big problem in a family then the psychology of the family members especially the kid's will be helathy. In addition many families, groups has become television oriented. For example in Turkey many people don't go out when Kurtlar Vadisi or Aşk-ı Memnu on television at that night. She also said that the transformation of culture occur in recent years. The rituals of a family such as jokes rituals, mealtime rituals orholiday rituals is changing.
To sum up, people and their cultureis changing with television. Children are becoming more insociable and alone.
I don't agree with Winn because many families can do common activities with television for example my parents and I watch films, series together. Also in football days my grandfathr, my dad and my uncle want to watch the game together so in these days my cousins and I will be together too.

9. Marked Woman

Retrieved, December 19, 2009 from;
http://www.clarkegalleries.com/posters/images/Marked%20Woman_lg.jpg

Last week one group from my class made a presentation about the text "Marked Woman". I really liked their presentation in generally.
The subject was very interesting. I liked the ineqalities in genders in names and titels like Mr., Mrs. or Miss. In Turkey women are marked because when a woman is married she have to change her surname or have to add her husband's surname. That makes a woman "marked" woman in Turkey. Also people in Turkey think that women have to stay in home after the marriage, in house the kitchen is the women's area, too. The place of women in society was changed since 1993 but there are still many inequalities between males and females.
On the other hand I never realized that in biologically males are marked, females are the dominant gender:)
Thanks for that presentation.

8. Practice Presentation

We did our practice presentation about the short story " a woman on a roof". My team was the first team of the presentations and I am a little bit excited before the presentation. After we started I am going to feel more comfortable because our colleagues and Sonja was very tolerant and gentle. I wasn't satisfied exactly with my performance because I and my partners made some mistakes for example we all read much more than we talked and we made short presentation than we should. Anyway we learned that what we should do and at which points did we good. Thaks to Sonja and the class members for their feedbacks and comments they will be useful and helpful sources for our presenting way.

7. Perfection

Hi everyone=)
I thought a lot about the beauty subject. Also I read the other blog pages and watched the dove commercial on Hazal's page. I remembered that video and in my opinion that commercial tells everything about the media pressure and "magic of computer-touching". With this kind of advertisements media impose physical perfection on women and young girls. For example many women envy the model bodies because media shows us models and their "perfect bodies" in everywhere. However their bodies are genetically thin and we want to be like them. So women start to make diets because of the blind diets women become anorexia. Media tells us these things and we try to achieve success. By the way in commercials we all see perfect breasts because "breasts sell absolutely everything" tells Jean Kilbourne (Killing us softly). So women begin to change their breast sizes with creams and plastic surgery (thanks God!:)). Women become more pleasurable and lose sensations in breasts so people don't realize that but women are becoming an object of someone else's pleasure. Men do nothing with their bodies because they think that their body good the way it is. There is no pressure for them. There are many inequality between genders and in recent years some of them are overcomed.
See you in the next entry:)

6."Ideal Beauty"

Media and advertisement are in everywhere in our lives. When we on the bus or are watching TV, movie, we can see and we are forced to see these advertisements. Because of this individuals are susceptible to media influence. Media and it's advertisements sell products in concept of sexuality or in romance and advertising tells us who we are or should be! Media tells us about the women ,how females look or ideal female beauty in our society and how it is important for a woman being beautiful. When women failed she should shame and should feel guilty about that. For example in recent years computers creat "ideal beauty/ ideal woman" so computers creat woman which is not exist at all and in the film "Killing us softly 3 ", Jean Kilbourne mentioned that too. She mentioned that media influences the fellings of men for women. Woman body turns to an object. The consequenses of such a behaviour is violence against women. For example woman body becomes a bottle of alcohol in an advertisement and females are not fully human with that objectification. So far I have never realized such an exploitation of female body and this film attract my attention.

5. Tough guise

I watched the film " Tough Guise" today. The film is like a documantry i think and very interesting in many ways. The subject is an actual subject and very informative.
At the beginning the narrator Jackson Katz makes a definition about the words "tough" and "guise". He says that the toughness based on extreme notion of masculinity and he has right because the meaning of tough become real men and the culture become more dominant. When I want to describe the word "masculinity", some words like powerful, tough, strong, macho came in my mind and in the video many people use these words to describe masculinity.
People learn it from their family, community but significantly from the media system. Media says that "being men= being violent". So young men become tough to survive and to be a real men.
I've never realized the change in size of male toys before I watched the video. It is a very interesting way to impose "masculinity, strentgh" in visually. There are bigger biceps etc. that represent more masculinity and violence. On the other hand female toys become much thinner and these inequallity on size of toys shows us the greater value on the size and shape.
Gun imagery become bigger, too. In 40's it was much smaller than 90's.
In the film Jackon talks about the kid-shooting or school-shooting. Kids killing kids and mostly the killers are the boys as New York Times mentioned. I noted down an expression of a killer boy and he says "I killed people because people like me are mistreated everyday". It is heartbreking but it is reality.
I want to write many thing about that subject but under a different topic=)

4. About ENG 101

In my ENG 101 class with Sonja is quite more fun than I expected. I learned how to make critics about stories, how to use citation, how to us APA format etc. The most significant part is that I have a blog page and I started to blogging in my own page as a blogger:) Today we learned image using too. I had no idea about copyright and to use an image properly before. I am quite sure that our future lessons will help me to improve my language skills as well as my analyzing skills.

3. A Woman on a Roof

The writer, Doris Lessing wrote an unusual short story. The subject is contemporary and mentions that how some men view women. There are three different male characters and each of them react and deal with the rejection from a woman with specific methods. The three men work on a roof of building and peep the neighbour woman, while she was sunbathing with her bikinis. The workers are: Harry, Tom and Stanley. Even the temperature is high they prefer to work on the roof for watching her. The woman on the roof ignore the three man at all. Next day the weather has changed and there is no sunbathers on the roof. The three men annoy the woman with the way their looks and they disturb her private life.
We can see more examples on the streets many male disturb womens while she was walking. It is very annoying. Also we can see the inequality between the male and female.

2. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Tonight I watched a movie which is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In this movie Jack Nicholson is starring with the character R. P. McMurphy. There is a mental hospital and in this hospital there are many patients with different psychological problems. McMurphy, who fakes to be "nuts" gets shocked when he sees the way patients obey the hospital managment. In his mind he knows that the order in the hospital will not do any good for the patients and he starts an uprising. For example in the scene where he bets others that he can escape from the hospital he tries to show other patients that there is an other way. Although he fails in this attempt he leaves the scene with the words " At least I have tried..." As he tries to break the "daily routine" of patients he get some new enemies like nurse Ratched. Doctors and nurses try to "help" McMurphy to get in to the "routine". The question, which the audience should be asking at the end of the film "How can we claim that those who decide, who is normal and who is not, is "normal" indeed?

1. The Enormous Radio

Last week we read the text"The Enormous Radio" and I want to mention the important parts ( at least for me :)) of that text. The story is about Jim and Irene Wescot. The couple is interested in music. They like to listen radio too. Wescot family has an old radio and one day Jim promise to buy a new radio for Irene. However, the radio makes some disturbing noises, which are the sounds of their neighbours. Jim and Irene try to solve the problem with the radio but they can't achieve that. Irene follow the conversations. It seems funny but then Irene becomes depressed and start to questionized their marrige, future and money. This couple lives in an apartment in New York's East Side and wants to move in a house, which shows us "the American Dream". They want to own a house in the suburbs, they have two kids and the husband has a job... The husband, Jim, loves his family. But Jim and Irene don't share any thing except music! Jim is a naive person because he doesn't spend time with his wife and family. He finds a sollution for this by buying this radio but the new radio becomes a significant factor between their relationship!