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.

Alex Ostrovsky

English 114B

April 29, 2012

How Are People Shaped By Their Environment

            I have decided to write my essay about how college students can be affected by living at the dorms versus living at home and commuting to school. I think that this decision of living at home or dorm living has a big impact on people later in their life. There are many reasons why people choose one option over the other, but both can affect the students in many different ways. I personally live in a dorm and can give first hand account as well as facts about living in a dorm and being away from home. Many things to take into account when comparing dorm life to living at home is how it changes you. When living at home students tend to stay with their high school friends and maintain their life in a normal way. To contrast this, living on campus can change students and expose them to new things that they may never have experienced before, such as many new found freedoms.

            I have found that many of my friends that I hung out with in high school that didn’t go away to college seemed to all stay in touch. While many of the friends of mine that went away to college around the country we all have lost touch with. When living at home you feel that there is a greater need for you to maintain the friendships with the people who stayed at home like you. When it comes to the students who went away from home to go to school they seemed to be more interested instead of keeping in touch with old friends they made new ones. I find that this isn’t done simply because they were away from friends and they felt that they needed to have people to hang out with. I think there’s something about living away from friends that makes you just want to get new ones.

            Out of personal experience me and my best friend since grad school managed to somehow get a room together, this seemed like it would make college the best times of my life but I was wrong. My best friend and I seemed to drift apart within the first two months. Soon we weren’t even hanging out anymore and now we don’t even talk. I think that this isn’t a bad thing at all. It’s just what college does do people, you find new people with common interests as you and also who have similar life goals.

            People living in the dorms and away from their parents have to learn for themselves what is right and wrong without their parents telling them what to do. Back when these students were public education they knew that thy had to show up to class and do all the work or else their parents got a call from the school telling them that their child didn’t do what they were supposed to do. When you get away from home and there’s nobody telling you its time to go to school there is a tendency to want to skip class or just blow off an assignment. It’s in college that people learn what kind of person they are, will they get up and go to class or will they blow it off for more sleep.

            I personally know that I have had battles with going to classes that I don’t necessarily like and doing assignments that I know aren’t really that important. I also know that I have decided to “screw it” and not go to class just so I can sleep in, and that I also have just turned my head the other way when it comes to doing a reading assignment for a class in order to have another forty five minutes of TV. Its things like this that make you wonder what does living away from home and away from your parents affect your school work and the amount of effort you put into it. It makes you wonder if you were in high school would your parents be getting mad at how much stuff your doing that’s not school work.

            Living at the dorms can shape people into who they really are. It shows people how important old friendships can be and how much they care about their education. For me I care a great deal about my friendships and am quickly realizing that living away from home wasn’t the best idea for me at all. It taught me that I am not motivated enough to keep myself doing my homework and not motivated enough to wake up for classes. Looking back after writing this I realize I just vented and didn’t really write the paper I was supposed to write, but that’s okay because this paper is about how my personal experience with space has shaped me and is continuing to shape what happens to me for the rest of my life.

The Essay Proposal

For my essay i have decided to write about the effect that a persons environment has on what kind of a person they grow up into. if a person growing up in a poor area  prone to crime and other things considered to be wrong with an area where the poorer people come from will grow up to live in the same situation or grow up into a life of crime. i plan to relate this to what i find out about person from a higher income areas in the United States. i plan to look at research regarding crime rates and where the people who commit the crimes come from. i will also look up where these poorer areas are located and how populated they are.

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.

the essay topic that i have chosen to write about is the amount of violence in the movie Gamer and how it socially accepted in the movie. i am going to relate this to our class theme of identity by showing how the violence in the movie is used to keep peoples minds thinking the same way and distracted. this relates to identity by showing how society in the film Gamer are all being show images of violence and thinking its okay in a way stripping people away from being an individual. i think that i persons identity is closely related to how much different everybody is from one another and how we all think in our own ways. so i think that the focus of my essay will show how Gamer society seems to strip people of their identity.