Trailers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvsZtGxsvV0- The Ugly Truth

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp--Un6fNro- Hitch

Occupy Protest Goes Terribly Wrong

Early Thursday morning, Oakland, California, is filled with shouting, fireworks, rocks and Occupy Oakland protestors.  After a long day of seemingly peaceful protesting, police respond to a call of people breaking into a building in downtown Oakland.  These protestors had broken into an office building and had begun to set numerous fires throughout.  When officers arrived, they were greeted by rocks, bottles, fireworks and other flaming objects.  Many of the protesters were holding shields and refusing to back down.  The protesters were quickly surrounded and the police used tear gas to calm the situation down.  The area was soon after secured and some arrests were made.  Earlier on Wednesday reports of vandalism of five small businesses including a Whole Foods, were reported.  I think that it is very important for these protestors to stay strong with what they believe in, however they must not use violence as a way of being heard.  

Apple Quality Already on the Decline?

After the death of their leader, has the quality of Apple's product output already begun to decline?  With the new CEO, Tim Cook, in place, just before the release of the Iphone 4S, the newest addition to the Apple family of products, Apple reported that their products would remain the same as they were before.  However new reports of glitches in the Iphone 4S, could show the beginning of the demise of this incredible company.  Apple has officially recognized that the new operating system that they released for some of their products and pre-installed on the 4S has created numerous problems for consumers.  One major problem is the quick loss of battery life.  This problem was discovered after the Iphone 4S release on October 14th, however Apple did not speak about it until very recently.  They report that they will address this issue with a new software update coming within the next few weeks.  They say that this software update will allow for all units operating on the new operating system  to changeover and have the same battery life which their products once had.  They report that the problem was caused by location based apps and multitasking glitches, which will all be addressed.

True It Is

Farhad Manjoo, i must admit that i may have been a bit hard on you early on, but you have grown on me a little bit, and your not so bad after all.  I feel that now, after the posting of my second blog post called True Enough or Not True At All: The story of a desperate author,  i have a certain responsibility to my readers as well as to Manjoo.  What Manjoo has said and the information he has given his readers in this novel was given an interesting spin.  I think that the effects of it are interesting to think about on certain  people.  The effect of reading this on a democrat would probably be different then the effect this novel has on a republican.  Personally after doing part of the reading i found myself doing just what i had read about in the selective exposure section.  During my readings, i began to choose selected passages and dwelled on them for longer than i should have.  I felt that they were attacks on republicans, regardless of my beliefs.  However I was choosing these passages because of my beliefs and i might have been taking them to have certain meaning that they may or may not have had.  I only discovered this in hindsight after our class discussion and writing my blog post.  Once the idea was presented that my reaction to Manjoo's writing may not have been necessary i began to think about what he had actually written and whether or not he was really attacking the Republicans and whether he was evenly distributing his arguments to both sides.  I began to see that i had in fact partially selectively exposed myself to certain portions of his writings.   Overall whether i had wanted to or not i did learn something about myself from this novel, which is that i may be way less accepting of ideas than i thought.  I always had considered myself as someone who was eager to learn about what people, who had opposing beliefs to mine, had thought.  It was not until after reading this novel that i recognized that this truly might not be the case.  I have learned something new about myself and now i will surely be open to new ideas because of my newly gained consciousness about the way i learn certain things.  

Tolerance

A lot of people, including myself, are prone to this idea of selective exposure.  This is that they expose themselves only to certain ideas and certain views.  However this is not how we as a human race became as successful as we are today.  We became this way by accepting people, being open to new ideas and allowing new cultures into our lives.  It is important for people today to once again learn to listen and learn to exchange with each other more than they are at the moment otherwise we will continue to have these incredible divides between us, which will eventually cause problems for us. I am a bit of a hypocrite, as i get caught up easily in some little things and am guilty of the exact thing i am posting about, however i still believe in this very strongly.  

This is a link to a recorded conversation with a Yale professor who speaks about the idea of Tolerance and what it has done for us as a people and for the world.  Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QenLlFx4cCQ

Speaking of Language and Power in the Public Sphere

DAVID GUETTA HAS DIED was what the caption read as i was skimming through some articles.  For those of you who do not know who David Guetta is, he is a music producer as well as an extraordinarily famous DJ.  An example of his music can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb6mS6Yj_UA

            The power of language in the public sphere is truly an incredible thing.  Today at approximately 3:30 P.M. an article was released with the headline that David Guetta had died.  This immediately sent many of his fans into an absolute frenzy trying to figure out what had happened, when and if this was in fact a true story.  This article was released by a website called Global Associated News, which is a website who has faked the deaths of people like Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler.  Whether or not the story is true, the team still put out a detailed article of an intense car wreck, in which they reported that Guetta was driving at 95 miles per hour in a 55 mile per hour zone.  They reported that he was recklessly driving his friends car and that he had been seen swerving across the yellow divider lines.  He supposedly hit a guard rail and the car flipped numerous times leading to his dreadful death.  It was said that police had recovered his identification card and that it said his name on it.  However, only one source has reported on this incident and it was not even a credible one.  All but this one source that i have looked at has reported that he is in fact alive and well.  If this story is in fact true, than it is very sad and the world lost an incredibly talented individual.  If this story is not true, it shows the   incredible power that the language of one writer has in the public sphere.

True Enough or Not True At All: The story of a desperate author.

               At first, this book was manageable, but at this point I am more than dissapointed.  While reading "True Enough" i have developed a deep sense of pity for Farhad Manjoo.  It seems to me that he was so desperate to write a book that he just decided to write about the first topic that came to his mind.  It also seems that he was angry at people who did not agree with his political ideals and chose to attack them using his writing.  This strategy would have worked had he put a little more effort into discovering useful and trustworthy evidence.  It also would have had a little more success had he not contradicted himself by using a pretty similar form of attack as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had used when responding to John Kerry's presidential nomination.
  
               The one interesting thing i have found while reading this was the concept of "selective exposure."  "Selective exposure- an idea that goes far in explaining why narratives with so little basis in fact, such as that proposed by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, can now effortlessly enter our political discourse.  Selective exposure arises out of the more famous theory of cognitive dissonance, which the psychologist Leon Festinger first proposed in 1957 the mental acrobatics people engage in when they're confronted with two or more "dissonant" thoughts." (P.29)  Farhad Manjoo offered some interesting evidence to support this theory.  He talked about how the Swift Boat Veterans had an argument with no basis of fact, and said that the people who agreed with them chose to partake in selective exposure.  This meant that they were exposing themselves only to the facts or ideas that they believed in, nothing that could contradict their theories or ideals.

           For me, this book and this topic would have been absolutely an alright and probably interesting one, however Manjoo seems to have forgotten why most people read books, to learn.  As a pretty open minded reader i generally expect to read something about a subject i am not too familiar with and to learn something from that.  I expect the author to promote this learning through his/her writing style, by using a gentle mix of both fact and opinion. By using both of these things i will remain open minded and seriously consider the writers opinions, potentially adapting them myself.  However, once a writer publishes something that is so strongly opinionated that it distracts its readers from the subject of the writing, I tend to either stop reading or i begin to pick the authors writing apart.  I tend to judge him on both the facts he states as well as the writing style he has written in, defeating the original purpose of the author.  Overall i truly wish that Manjoo had gone about this in a different manner than he has and that one day he will gain support of many more readers through a different style of writing.