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.

Response to "Gamer"

In the movie Gamer there is violence in almost every scene in the movie. I think why the director did this was to show how normal violence is becoming to everybody in the modern world. since the invention of the television it has made it possible for the broadcasting of violent images of war, murders, and racism able to be seen by anyone at anytime. Coming to more current times with the internet in our hands and with us at anytime we are able to see these images even more readily. That is why the movie Gamer is so violent and disturbing, yet everyone living in this world seems to see it as just normal. Things that happen in the movie Gamer would be seen on national television and even the front pages of the newspaper. (but people would just look it up on their phones anyway) There is murder happening on a massive scale in the game slayers and it has become like watching football or baseball with your family and friends. The point of the movie in my own opinion is to show how the availability of mass media and extremely violent video games is slowly making violence seem normal and even acceptable.

As games are becoming more and more realistic and many more options for its users to change and manipulate their avatars. I feel there is a greater attachment to the games and the avatars that each user creates. Once a gamer gets into gaming and plays for hours a day i feel that they loose contact with their friends and become a bit anti social. I know this from personal experience, I know a friend who i rarely see anymore because all he does is play online games like world of warcraft and other games like that. before his introduction to video games i would hang out with him and all my other friends everyday. I don't think that video games make a person loose their sense of reality or blur their ability to distinguish the game from the real world. Many gamer's may loose track of time and not get enough sleep witch i feel may lead to some social disorders and cause them to appear to no longer be able to tell the difference between the game and real life. When a person is always playing a game and never really have time to socialize with people other than on their computers or other consoles. I feel that this is what leads them to always be thinking of their game play and their avatars witch as i said might make make them appear to have lost touch with reality. So i don't truly think that in the majority of gamers have those kinds of problems yet there is certainly a group of people who have indeed lost touch of reality and cannot function in the real world. yet i think that these people must have a condition that makes them unable to see this clear difference between the gaming world and the real world. I think think that not being able to tell the difference between the gaming world and the real world would be like someone not being able to tell the difference between when they are dreaming and when they are awake.

Alex Ostrovsky

Response to: Implications of User Choice: The Cultural Logic of “MySpace or

Facebook?

When I first started to use Myspace i only started to do it because my friends were saying things like "ill send it to you on myspace" and other stuff like that. I had to get a myspace in order to stay connected with people and try to keep up with what everyone was doing. I never really used my myspace all that much and i think that the way the author says that "they go where their friends are" and i think that is one hundred percent true. i only started to use it because it was what my friends were doing. then suddenly everyone was moving to facebook and many people like me just went with the flow. i don't think that it has anything to with myspace becoming all ghetto or lame, it was more just the next thing and kids wanted to be a part of it. so in the next year or so there will be something new and facebook will tossed aside for this new social networking site and the new question of the next article with be Implications of User Choice: The Cultural Logic of “Facebook or Bookface? Then Myspace will become filled with Hipsters saying that the other two are too mainstream.