Author Archives: jd069511

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2187105#.UCv5HallTUc

After reading this article, I feel as a person living in today’s society feel a little sad and disappointed.  To me this plain outright sounds ridiculous.  How can you compare a walk or gait to something and concrete as a fingerprint or DNA.  Is it me or is society trying every possible way of identifying a criminal in any possible way.  Making any irrelevant thing we do on a day to day basis a way of identifying us or linking it to something to refer us to a category of some sort.  The article says that every person has a their own unique way of walking and that you can use technology to help recognize what kind of walk to who it is.  But I do not think that is right in saying you can relate a walk to a type of person.  Just because someone who walks a certain way does not mean that all people who walk the same way are also the same person.  For instance, a child who follows a rigorous training in a sport develops a certain type of gait and another child the same thing, but one becomes a criminal and the other does not.  That does not mean the one child who is not a criminal will eventually be one and a walk has no link to a mental reasoning behind criminality.  And who says a person committing a crime will have the same exact walk when is doing the crime to when he strolls along everyday.  The argument is invalid to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGX7uKXDMT4&feature=player_embedded#!

I did not finish seeking out the rest of the videos of this lecture.  I feel that this part was efficient enough to get to the point.  Prof. Amos Wilson talks about how drugs is just being placed upon you by those you trust.  The doctor says or the state says, that is how we go by.  Because a person shows signs of misconduct, he or she is automatically sick in some way.  There is something not normal about this child or person and we need to cure them.  Even though they actually are just being a little overactive.  He further explains how when there is a change in the brain, it is nothing but an experience the brain is gaining and reacting to it and becoming stimulated, it should not be said to be a problem or sickness.  Society is helping the brain change and they also make the claim of saying there is something wrong.  So it is not the children that has the problem, it is society.  Society puts the blame on the children having problems just because they do not want to try and help, putting a label on them and having it packed away in a easy to resolve situation.  Your child is loud and disruptive, he needs to be treated for something.  It is just a quick fix solution to those who want the easy way out of a situation and if it hurts someone it does not affect them because these people are fixing them for normal society.

http://suite101.com/article/stereotypes-of-minorities-in-the-media-a134017

After reading this article, it talks about how the media portrays minorities and how that affects the view of what minorities in low income areas are really like.  It talks about how the media primarily and purposely focuses on minorities and creates the images to viewers about what a criminal looks like and where criminals are more likely to be found.  As stated in the article, minorities are shown in news restrained and escorted by authorities while white people are next to the lawyer.  Also media always target areas of lower income and focuses on the crimes of the minorities that occur there, depicting to the general public that these  people are dangerous, meaning blacks in urban environments.  This reflects onto Emile Durkheim “What is a Social Fact”.  What do the general public know as facts and what is actually stereotypes being pushed in to them.  What we know as one form of learning and discovering, the news, can be such a biased and manipulated form of media, what can one take in from it to be actual facts.  When presented with new media, do people not automatically make assumptions or stereotypes right away because constantly being fed with these images of what is suppose to be a criminal and where they are to happen, one can not see pass it and creates the same stereotype.  The medias influence on what is viewed as news and facts creates these stereotypes or further perpetuates them and society wont be able to move pass these stereotypes.