Blog #7 Project Space: Local Grocery Store

I went into my local grocery store for project space and walked around to see what i could find out about it. It was an Albertsons located in the middle of my home town. As you walk in to your right there was all the check out stands and on your right was the pharmacy. I also took note that all the vegetables and fresh food were on the left while all the frozen and canned goods were located on the right. In the middle of the store was the rest of the stuff, your house cleaners, toy aisle, and other weird assorted goods that every market seems to have all lumped in one area. I think that the store is set up like this because if they mixed fresh foods and canned it would just make it confusing for the customers. I chose to do my project space on my local grocery store because its such a simple space that people use all the time and don't take the time to notice how its set up. People have become used to the basic set up for all grocery stores and i think most are set up the way mine is.

5) Study the spatial design of a store in your area. How does the design promote consumption?


There Music store near my house is called Instrumental Music and its a normal sized music store with all the normal instruments and accessories in it. Thinking about how it looks makes me wonder why they would have set it up the way that they did. The store is a long rectangle with doors allowing you to enter are located directly in the middle of that rectangle. On one side of the store there are guitars and on the exact opposite side there are the bass guitars, with various acoustics and obscure instruments peppered in between these to sides. these instruments are hung on the walls and have many rows of shelves that you have to make your way through before you can make it back to these areas. The reason I think they came up with this is so you have to pass up these "less desirable" merchandise on your way to the good stuff so maybe on your way you'll stop and buy one of them. I think this is the basic set up of many stores but it hadn't really hit me until i was trying to get back to the bass guitar section of the store and i found myself looking at some extremely unnecessary guitar extras. Then noticed that there little plan was working. The way a store is set up inst just done for looks its more of a science to get you to buy more and to notice things that you wouldn't have normally seen.

Alex Ostrovsky

3/2/2012

Eric Dinsmore

English 114B

Violence in the Modern World

After watching the film “Gamer” is a movie set place in the not to distant future where things we once thought we only doable in video games is actually possible in real life. There are real life version of a “Sims' game where real humans are controlled by others from anywhere on the planet. Also in this future society there is a game that is more or less the real life equivalent of “Call of Duty” also real people being controlled by a stranger. These people die and are forgotten about leaving the person playing them completely unharmed. These games that people play is not to far off from what is happening in present day, granted there are no real humans being controlled or killed in the current games being played now. Even without real human beings being killed there still is a very high level of violence being portrayed in games like “Call of Duty” and “Grand Theft Auto”.

In the passed before video games, the availability of quick and in real time news, and all the insane graphics that we can now put into movies there was a real lack of violence in peoples day to day life. It seemed like the only violence you could find back in the day was real war or whatever you read in a book or a comic. Many people would have gone about there life without the availability to see all the violence that we see almost on a daily basis. When you compare today to what our parents had its almost insane the technology leap we have made in even the last twenty years. I have seen little kids playing “Call of Duty” and other violent video games and it doesn’t seem to bother them at all. I don’t see why kids are allowed to play these games. Shouldn’t these kids parents care what they are doing and what kind of an effect it has on them. In the fifties Rock n Roll was considered to be a terrible influence on people and that wasn’t even violent. Imagine what those people who thought that Rock n Roll was bad would think about all these games and movies that we all can easily get our hands on.

In the film “Gamer” there is a game in which real people are controlled by other humans and are forced to fight each other in vicious combat. The game is called Slayer and has become the futures equivalent of today football Sunday. Everyone can watch it on TV and enjoy there favorite player blast other people into mush with a variety of guns. This is almost exactly what kids today are able to do. In the movie “Gamer” we see a social acceptance of violence and it also seems as if the people living in this world have no emotion toward violence. I think that it is trying to show us that if we keep allowing for kids of our generation see violent images and are taught that playing these games are okay, and that things done in the games aren’t really that bad we will have a serious problem in the future. I don’t think that our society will ever go as far as in the movie “Gamer” but it is possible for us to approach a similar level of acceptance.

We may not think that all these violence in video games is wrong, and even some have argued that with all the video games out there it has shown to have a possible impact on crime rates helping them go down. This is crazy to even consider, how can making violence almost acceptable in the eyes of the youth a good thing? It cant be good to allow kids to grow up in a world where violence is becoming a social norm and only time will tell how it will effect us.