Week Six: Changing Social Connections

I think that technology such as email and online social networks are great for easy networking and do help connect people who live far away from each other such as myself with my friend from high school who lives now in California. In other ways, I believe that technology can distance people from each other. When shooting an email to someone in a fast manner pleasantries are extricated, and small conversation is lost. A simple how have you been and what have you been up too is easily ignored when reading over an email and the answers to emails are shorter than the initial message. People loose face to face contact easily, and talk over the phone less reducing conversation to quick and easy texts. Also with phone technology so much more we find companies using automated answering services taking customer calls. Questions and answers are not so easily understood and communication is ultimately lost. Situations like this make me hate technology....and wonder if we would be better off without it.

Week Five: The Criminal Justice System

Shaming as Punishment

Reading about shaming as a means of punishment, I am really interested about this method. I think it would be really interesting to see if it would work in America the way it seems to be working for Japan, and I think we should really try it out. I would like to know more about the way they go about shaming the offender. I think that it would be a difficult task to go about doing correctly and that many things could easily go wrong. Publicly shaming a criminal is something that people have done for ages-like the way they used to lock criminal's heads and hands in a wooden panel in front of a town in the middle ages while people threw rotten tomatoes at them. But wondering if this really worked to stop the crimes I think it would be crucial to make sure this public shameing didn't end up just making the criminal more angry, or spiteful. I think that in cases of very serious crimes such as death or inflicting of pain on another, the offender would be sorry no matter what. But in more petty crimes like stealing or doing drugs, I'm not sure if the shame of the crime would be enough to deter the offender to continue offending.

Week Four: Nature v. Nurture

As many other people in my class have said, I too think that both nature and nurture have contributive qualities in shaping a person. Nature has obvious roles in the outcome of an individual for example the beginning qualities and traits one is born with, the color of their eyes, the shape of their features, the things that they inherit from their genes. But also, I think that once this original foundation in nature is formed, nurture steps in and takes over many determining factors. The place you live, the people you interact with, the food you eat, education you are given, and so many more things really make you into the person you are. So many people don't realize how effected they really are by these things. For example if you take two twins, who are identical in gene make up, and separate them at birth putting one in a well off family who gives the child whatever they want, feeds them plenty of healthy foods and provides them with a healthy diet and a good education and then on the other hand take the other twin and putt them in a family who struggles to put food on the table, and lives in a tight space in a bad neighborhood that child will be very different. The child in the struggling family might not get a good education because of poor schooling systems, and might have stunted growth from lack of nutrition. The other child in the wealthy family might be very tall. The poor twin might grow up to earn minimum wage and end up disliking their life situation possibly turning to a life of crime out of desperation, where the well off twin might end up earning millions and living a continued life of luxury. The twins started out in the same place and with the exact same make up, but turned out completely different because of the way they were nurtured.

Week Three: Understanding how American Culture Looks to Outsiders

After watching the clip from YouTube with Hugh Laurie jokingly singing a tribute to America as a British comedy sketch-I think it's safe to say that Americans are seen as pretty shallow, or bland. He repeats "America" over and over again while the crowd laughs which I think is a way of saying Americans have a lot of nation pride, but don't have a lot they can say to back it up with. When he starts the second verse of "States" , I think its a way of a desperate attempt to find variety to promote the country. This ends in failure when all he can find to say is "states" over and over. The way that the clip just cuts him off at the end, gives a "who cares" kind of feeling. I think Americans end up looking pretty stupid in the end.