My paper draft...

Kristopher Rodriguez
Doctor Louie Lucca
April 27, 2010
HUC 130
Television through My Eyes

vi•o•lence
n.
1. Physical force exerted for the purpose of violating, damaging, or abusing.
2. The act or an instance of violent action or behavior.
3. Intensity or severity, as in natural phenomena; untamed force.
4. Abusive or unjust exercise of power.
5. Abuse or injury to meaning, content, or intent.
6. Vehemence of feeling or expression; fervor.

me•di•a–noun
1. a pl. of medium.
2. (usually used with a plural verb ) the means of communication, as radio and television, newspapers, and magazines, that reach or influence people widely

Imagine you are ten years old, watching a favorite show of yours, called WWE Smack Down. You are so excited to see your favorite characters do so many crazy stunts in a squared circle, like a frog splash, or a choke slam, or even the new move that just came out from a new character that arrived, the Jack Hammer. This new character (a man who calls him Goldberg) just won with this move, and you are awestruck with the power of this man. You are ten years old and you your think what your watching is real, that the man in that ring really knocked out this guy and he actually won a real wrestling match. Well in comes your father who is watching the program with you and tells you that what you are watching is fake and that nobody could really do that move at all, without help from the other guy. You ask why are they helping each other if they hate each other, and your father answers the obvious answer: wrestling is fake, a soap opera, an over the top performance that isn’t real at all.

The next morning appears and you are off to school. It’s a nice day with a little cloud cover and you’re feeling pretty good. You have almost completely forgotten last night and your mind is set on other things. You’re walking with your whole family to the car so that way you’re all together. All of a sudden as soon as you get to the entrance to the parking lot you look over at the playground near your house and you see a bunch of kids actually wrestling on the hard concrete floor. You see that they are almost half naked, bleeding from the top of their heads, and they have each other in headlocks. Your father sees what you’re looking at and hurry’s you away, but not before you see one of the boys give the other the Jackhammer and you see him limp on the ground.

I never knew what happened to that boy. I never even knew his family, who he was what kind of person he was, and honestly I didn’t care. What sparked my interest, what stuck in my mind was that almost everything they used on each other I could have announced out loud if I was announcing a wrestling match instead of seeing an actual fight. I thought of the entertainment side of it, not of the violence, but of the entertainment.

It seems to me at this point and age of my life that most people would attribute to the raise of violence in the last couple of decades is due to the way that violence is portrayed in everyday life on a television screen at home through the eyes of our children. It seems that to me, media didn’t have a lot of control as to what went on the T.V. screen at the time of me being introduced to professional wrestling, and if they did my opinion is that they let it get as worse as it did because they needed the ratings to get people to watch they’re show. It does how ever come at a cost for us as humans because most things kids watch on T.V. stay in their heads for a very long time especially if it’s something that catches they’re attention when they watch T.V. Twenty four/Seven. According to sources in the Washington post (Vedantam, “As Well As Children”), “Teenagers and young adults who watch even as little as an hour of television a day are more likely to get into fights, commit assaults or engage in other types of violence later in life…” which means that young people of any age can just turn on the T.V. watch something and actually get even more violent themselves. Now to me wouldn’t that mean that actually watching a very violent T.V. show like World Wrestling Entertainment might have something to do with why kids are acting like the characters of this program? From my own boy-hood experiences then that means that this is exactly what’s happening in our society in yester-year, and it still continues into our society today.
But apparently this “…claim isn’t supported by data.” According to Levitt and Dubner, they are “…making an entirely different argument here. Our claim is that children who grew up watching a lot of T.V., even the most innocuous family-friendly shows, were more likely to engage in crime when they got older.” Well there are statistics that actually prove this fact true according to an article called “Want to Raise a Bully? Turn on the TV…” four-year-olds watching the daily average, which is about 3 hours, were 25% more likely to become bullies. Also a single child “watching more than eight hours of television per day was 200% more likely to bully.” So stating these facts actually proves the point of children actually watching television can not only lead to bullying and violence outside on the streets. This should encourage people to not watch TV at all but according to this article it hasn’t.
`Well I know one thing for sure that

Blog 13- my Rough Draft

Kristopher Rodriguez
4/21/10

I am going to show how light and darkness in the movie shows us the mood of the man. It shows in a variety of places and most of them happen when the man is showing a happy emotion or a sad emotion, and you could almost tell each time through the background how he was feeling at the time. In fact I see that most of the characters could tell you how they feel through the background, but it’s mostly focused on the man that is followed through-out almost the entire movie save for the part where they introduce the woman who he’s cheating on his wife with.
Let’s first look at how the woman is introduced, as it plays a part about how her very nature is in this movie. She lives at this point in the movie, in a rundown old shack in the middle of nowhere. It’s very dark and gloomy and a little bit like a place no one would dare catch someone who lives like a queen anywhere near there. The way the background is set-up with hardly any light what so ever in any of her scenes, it gives off that she’s a very lonely city girl and not a girl who was brought up with decent manners.
Usually when a character is introduced in a dark setting they are usually evil in some way or form. This is a common theme surrounding villains in stories like this, because darkness is well associated with evil or evil intentions, while very bright lighting usually shows us that there is a good guy/girl already there waiting to be introduced in the story. This gives film-makers the perfect set-up for how they want their characters to show who they are before they are even introduced into the story.
Let’s go to the introduction of the man. In this background this background you see him in a dark room with only one light in the middle of a table. The walls are dark, he is hunched over to look as though he is dark and even his cloths are dark save for a single white shirt he has underneath his jacket. This kind of set-up shows us a couple of things about this guy. It seems to me the two lights are a symbol for whatever war his soul is having inside of him. On one side he is conflicted between the two women, the one from the city and his wife. You could also say that the darkness all around him is his depression that he is going through with the selling of his crops, and the way he and his wife are with each other now, but that one light in the middle is the happiness he finds when he’s with the woman from the city.
When the husband tries to leave to go to the swamp, the wife is introduced and the situation with the two light and darkness shift a little bit. Now it seems she also shares a bit of gloom with him because he keeps leaving and she knows where he’ll be going all this time and her one guiding light is that her husband will return to her after he’s had his fun. As she sits with the bowl in the same place he was it’s kind of like they switched places and now she carries his grief, his darkness, but it seems they do not have the same happy thoughts that keep them happy or in the case of the wife, a reason to keep going.

(this is my first draft. before anyone says anything, I know it isn't finnished at all. I will post the final later today.)

What I did for my research...

Well at first I needed to get statistics as to why watching to much T.V. for kids is a bad thing because I have had experiences where T.V. has influenced the way how kids "play" in the court yard near my house. So I got some stuff on the web that I felt was very intresting and proved my point pretty clearly. I found the website on google, which is kidshealth.org, and it explains how much kids and young adults watch to much T.V. how some watch even seven hours of it before playing video games or some other form of entertainment that require's a television. unfortunately I could only print out some of the info as the polocy of the computer lab is a ten page limit or something like that. But tomorrow is as always another day.

Why I said what I said to Parris and Joshua.

Well I said what I said to these two was very simple. While both there shorts were very good they lacked certain detail's in there example's that could have made it so much better to understand what they were talking about. Joshua had his points across very well but his example's lacked in backing them up. Parris was all over the place and although she described the picture pretty good, the fact is that Parris kept coming back to the same thing over and over again and it was just like a very long run on sentence that had nothing to back up what she was saying in the short. They have some pretty good potential, but it was lacking and they can do better.

Blog Nine

I believe that what Louie is asking us to simply research or investigate how crime is somehow linked to T.V. or not. According to him, Levitt and Dubner believed that T.V. shows like Leave it to Beaver started crime. The evidence was not enough from a statistical view point. One other Hypothesis he has stated was that a baby boom was to account for all the violence, as well as the migration of African’s and the return of Vietnam soldiers however even this doesn’t support their claim. My position on the upscale of crime is not in any T.V. show but of the government, because as we have seen before the government will stop at nothing to be the superpower of the world. This usually stirs up rebellion in its own country, and then people start to break laws because they believe that as long as the government holds tightly to its country, the more the country will fight back. This is all caused by the American dream showed to us every day on T.V. that we watch because we are so used to just sitting down and watching T.V. that it is a constant from the moment we are born. This has been proven time and time again, although finding this research will be hard because not many people have these types of things on a web search engine such as Google. What I think I need is the statistics on how Television has affected us since its inception and also statistics that show how much people watch T.V. now. Again I doubt it but I will use the search engine Google to find my supporting evidence.