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Reflections on Technology and Self
“‘You engage in an exchange of emails or instant messages or Facebook updates. Is the unknown respondent another person, or is it a bot? Is it someone, or is it a computer program passing as a person? You want to know. Based only on the conversation, can you judge whether the other is human or…
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We Are All One Family: Religion and its Role in Society
“The ocean of suffering is immense, but if you turn around, you can see land” – Thich Nhat Hanh There are something like eighteen billion cells in the brain alone. There are no two brains alike; there are no two hands alike; there are no two human beings alike. You can take your guidance and…
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I Spit on Your Grave Film Analysis
This essay examines the exploitation film I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and its recent remake (2010), and how both these films make strong comments about the culture which they were released in and the context which they were interpreted. The original film was visually enhanced and re-released on Blu-Ray this year, and therefore, along with its remake stands as a…
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The Silent Noise of Networks
Last week’s article on MySpace fans burnt me out a bit, so it was nice to read this week’s article, in comparison it was a lungful of fresh air. The article by Kate Crawford (2010) titled ‘Noise, Now: Listening to Networks’, happens to be one of the shortest readings of the semester, with only 5 or 6…
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Unravelling Myspace Character Personas
This week’s (technically last week’s) reading, titled ‘Rereading Fandom: Myspace Character personas and Narrative Identification’ by Paul Booth (2008) reads like an article carefully constructed by an android trying to dissect the nuances of human identity, due to its own lack of and longing for one. The article explores, or rather examines in excruciatingly painful…
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GTA San Andreas and the Pedagogy of Racism
This week we were given a choice between seven articles centered on the theme of othering, or the process of identifying those that are different from the mainstream. Glancing through the list of articles I noticed one had Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas in the title, and considering I used to play the game (and almost…
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Sex Sells: The Male Gaze in Advertising
This week’s reading by Debra Merskin (2006, p. 202), asks the question that is clearly on everyone’s mind: ‘Where Are the Clothes?’ The text explores the sexualisation and pornographication (my spell check agrees that this is a made up word) of modern advertising, and its secret agenda to ‘maintain the sexual subordination of women’ and keep us men thinking…
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Vipassana Meditation in Prisons
This Week’s reading is an excerpt from Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish which explores the prison system and how it was born out of the security imposed upon the ‘plague-stricken town’ of the seventeenth century (Foucault, 1997, p.205). Foucault also introduces the reader to Bentham’s design of the Panopticon – a cylindrical wall of…
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Examining the Virtual Sphere
This week’s reading titled ‘The virtual sphere’ explores the concept of democracy and whether or not it exists or will exist in the internet equivalent of the offline public sphere. Papacharissi (2002, p. 11) paraphrases Habermas (1962/1989) who romanticises the public sphere in the 17th and 18th century as ‘the domain of our social life…
