The Social Network

Ha, I don't know how to post this as a video simply as a link but, I'm excited to see this and think it'll be an interesting take about how we have made our private lives "public" to so many people. It makes me question what individiual "private" rights are even made up of anymore?

http://www.youtube.com/user/SocialNetworkMovie?v=53OUHupfqws&feature=pyv&ad=6836107426&kw=the%20social%20network%20trailer

Problem Posing Topic: The number of homeless people on the streets

I have chosen to write about the number of homeless people that are on the streets, not only in our city, but all over the nation. I have chosen this topic because it is someting that affects every person in nearly every country. There have been homeless people for generations, and there will continue to be homeless people for many generations to come if we do not help. This topic hits very close to home for me because my father was homeless for more than six months about a year ago. I am not asking for people to take in random men/women from the streets, but at least a little more compassion would be nice. There are those of us who mindlessly waste our money, myself included, without a care or a worry of when or where our next meal will come; whether or not we will spend the night our of the cold air. For me, this is just a very important topic that deserves a second look.

The Idealized Woman

For my Problem Posing Paper I'm going to be discussing the idealization of women in the media and how this idealization leads normal, everyday women, to have unhealthy self-images. These harmful self-images stem from the inability of normal women to live up to the perfect portrayals of the female which constantly bombard them throughout their day, whether it be on the shows they watch, movies they see, or magazines they read. Society has idealized "woman" and if “she” can not live up to its standards then she is "less than". The media is a MASSIVE public sphere and these days it’s where we get a lot of our information and are involved in a majority of our public discussions, at least, in broader society. The media in this sense has projected this hyperreal woman who know one can really ever live up to but has somehow managed to formulate all our ideas pertaining to what a woman is and SHOULD be. This is dangerous and completely disregards Habermas’s idea of “public authority” which “derives its task of caring for the well-being of all citizens primarily from this aspect of the public sphere” (49). There appears to be a lack of “public authority” in the media sphere since the images that are allowed to be projected continue to be displayed frivolously despite the increase of bulimia and anorexia because of them.