3.
All I can say about this is that it is true. I know that I am not the same person at Linworth as I am at home. I have different personalities for different times and I have known that forever. I think that this is a pretty basic idea even when you focus it on things like lying. For example I have no problems lying to my father but I can't lie to my mother. I can cheat when I am playing solitaire by myself but if anyone is around I won't do it. There are so many things that affect the way and reasons that people do things or think in certain ways that it just makes sense that these factors also affect character.
4.
As you may have realized in my earlier post about the shootings, I don't really care that much. The question is would I stop for the injured man on the street? Well as I explained earlier it all depends. I would probably judge how bad his injuries were, how likely it would be for someone else to stop instead, how much time I had, how important the meeting is, so on and so forth. If I thought that his injuries weren't that bad I wouldn't stop at all. If somebody else were there I wouldn't help. Everything is a variable in this situation and there are just so many combinations that I would get bored stitting here and listing them all. I think that I would be able to outsmart the problem by calling the people that I was suppost to be presenting to and telling them that I was going to be late. I don't think that that was an option so I think that I will stick to my "leave you dying" position on this topic. Sorry if that seems mean.
2/24/08
Linworth's epidemic and Stanford v.s. V
As I have said, I have been having difficulty coming up with enough stuff to write about for two posts. So, because Jen was so nice as to give us discussion topics for this chapter, I will do two of each in each of the posts. Woohoo for lack of imagingation!
1.
The broken window theory seemed truly inventive and thoughtful to me. I love the idea that one tiny detail can sway someone so strongly. I think that it is really true. I was trying to come up with examples and I think that I found one that may be pretty true. Lets say that there is nobody at Linworth that breaks the "no internet except for school stuff" rule. One day Joe decides that he is going to check his email. This may or may not have been school related but Mary sees him and decides to check hers as well. Mary's email has nothing to do with school, in fact it is just full of facebook notices and other junk mail. Then Billy walks in and sees her doing stuff related to facebook he decides that its ok to update his status and everything snowballs out of control. I have no idea if that is a good example or not but I think that it fits pretty well because the whole thing just started as one person doing one thing. One small glance at another person's screen could start an epidemic of improper computer usage. (This is probably true, quite to my dissatisfaction)
2.
The whole fake prison thing made me think of V for Vendetta. Thats pretty much all I could think about while I was reading this section. The two seem really similar at first but then the stories become truly opposite but also quite the same. The people who were doing the study said that the situation made the people change and be something that they weren't. The guards became authoritarian and the prisoners became depressed. The setting made them change from their normal cheery selves. In V for Vendetta Evey, the girl, is captured by V and is taken to a fake prison just like the one in the study. She is tortured and left alone but when she is released she is not the same person. She is stronger and as V puts it, she found out who she truly is and what she is willing to die for. I think that the two situations are the same. The people in the study weren't changed at all by their enviornment, it just showed them sides of themselves that not even they had seen before. The conclusions that the two studies come to are different. The Stanfordians believe that it is all to do with the enviornment and that once that the situation is gone, so is that side of the person but V believes that a person is who he is and just shows different sides of himself at different times and that that new knowledge can be useful. I don't know which is right but I relly like V for Vendetta so that is who I declare the winner.
1.
The broken window theory seemed truly inventive and thoughtful to me. I love the idea that one tiny detail can sway someone so strongly. I think that it is really true. I was trying to come up with examples and I think that I found one that may be pretty true. Lets say that there is nobody at Linworth that breaks the "no internet except for school stuff" rule. One day Joe decides that he is going to check his email. This may or may not have been school related but Mary sees him and decides to check hers as well. Mary's email has nothing to do with school, in fact it is just full of facebook notices and other junk mail. Then Billy walks in and sees her doing stuff related to facebook he decides that its ok to update his status and everything snowballs out of control. I have no idea if that is a good example or not but I think that it fits pretty well because the whole thing just started as one person doing one thing. One small glance at another person's screen could start an epidemic of improper computer usage. (This is probably true, quite to my dissatisfaction)
2.
The whole fake prison thing made me think of V for Vendetta. Thats pretty much all I could think about while I was reading this section. The two seem really similar at first but then the stories become truly opposite but also quite the same. The people who were doing the study said that the situation made the people change and be something that they weren't. The guards became authoritarian and the prisoners became depressed. The setting made them change from their normal cheery selves. In V for Vendetta Evey, the girl, is captured by V and is taken to a fake prison just like the one in the study. She is tortured and left alone but when she is released she is not the same person. She is stronger and as V puts it, she found out who she truly is and what she is willing to die for. I think that the two situations are the same. The people in the study weren't changed at all by their enviornment, it just showed them sides of themselves that not even they had seen before. The conclusions that the two studies come to are different. The Stanfordians believe that it is all to do with the enviornment and that once that the situation is gone, so is that side of the person but V believes that a person is who he is and just shows different sides of himself at different times and that that new knowledge can be useful. I don't know which is right but I relly like V for Vendetta so that is who I declare the winner.
Once again, the media is at fault.
I have to admit that I find myself caring less and less about these shootings. I have never been very sympathetic to things that I hear on the news or that I read in the paper because I don't really have much emotionally invested in people I don't know. I hate to sound cruel and callous but thats just how I feel. I never really been affected, in a good or bad way, by these events and I try not to be. They happen just too often; if I cried everytime I heard about someone getting shot or killed I would still be choked up about 9/11. To tell you the truth I can't even remember where the first of these college shootings was. I am not saying that other people shouldn't be sad or that the families of these students shouldn't feel sad or even that you are a sap if you are sad but I just don't find much point. I would much rather focus all of that negative energy elsewhere and use it for good. Perhaps finding a way to prevent these things from happening? If all of the thought that was spent on these killings was channeled and used to stop them we could find a solution in a day. My idea would be to stop splattering it all over the news. These attacks are looking more and more similar and I believe it is because people are getting their ideas from the news. The fact that this guy bought gun accesories from the same website as the last shooter says something to me. It says that we release too much information. Did I honestly need to know exactly how he went about the whole operation? On the Today Show I saw a step by step description of what he did leading up to and during the shooting. If that isn't a set of instructions for someone else to follow his footsteps I don't know what is. I think that if we just stopped giving people ideas we might see less of the problem.
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