America's Top 50 Givers link

In today’s world, media and other members of the 99% are constantly degrading the one percent and this is a bit unfair.  It may seem a bit unfair that they are looked at negatively by the 99% because the majority (59% as of 2004 and increasing-Forbes) of them are self made billionaires that worked hard to get where they are today. Many of these people that live in the one percent are also philanthropists and they give more in a year than most people will make in a lifetime.  My goal is to take a look at the one percent and see the good that they do for the people in this world.  The link that I will provide below is a list from Forbes that shows the yearly total of the top 50 givers in America. 

http://www.forbes.com/special-report/2013/philanthropy/top-givers.html

Blog 6

For the second major project of this semester I will be focusing primarily on the top 1% of the financial community.  The reason I have decided to select this community is because there are so few of them but they control a lot of the power in our nation.  Many of these people are in the public eye and a lot of them are people that others tend to look up to and aspire to be like.  Included in this group are a lot of the higher up politicians, top executives in corporations, and professional athletes.  Sometime in everyone’s life I’m sure they have wanted to be like some of the richest people in America. 

For this project I believe I will look at both texts written about the group and texts that the group themselves have created talking about themselves.  There are many texts that will be easily available that are written about the top 1% and that will assist heavily with this project.  I have also come across in the past some documentaries that were made by family members in the 1% that talk about their lives and how things go with the money.  With that being said I will have a mix of the different kinds of texts.  Perhaps I will have some newspaper articles, magazine articles, online periodicals, and I will surely be using some videos that will help with this project.  For this project I think I will be looking at how the 1% is considered to be “othered” and not considered to be part of the norm in society.

Blog 5

Social construction was represented throughout most of the entire Radio Lab podcast about football.  The podcast started out talking about some of the early days of football and then went more in depth about it when the Indian school named Carlisle started to play football against some of the Ivy League schools such as Harvard.  The schools founder, Richard Pratt, originally was a little opposed to the Indian kids playing such a violent sport such as football because he didn’t want people to look at them and start stereotyping them further as savages or overly aggressive.  Eventually Pratt let in and allowed football to be played at the school if they followed some rules. “Never slug, people looking on will say ‘that’s the Indian in them. Just see them, they’re savages.”-Pratt. 

During one game against either Yale or Harvard the referee at the game called a bad call against Carlisle.  The stands from the Ivy League school were upset because everyone there knew it was a poor call and it was deliberately meant to hurt Carlisle in the game.  The reason the referee called such a bad was because he did not want a school like Carlisle to defeat one of the leading academic schools in the nation, which also happened to be one of the best football teams.  Along with that reason it would have looked negative to have “civilized” students be defeated by a group of students from another school that were looked on as negative at the time. 

An example of social construction I saw reading the Lorber text was when the person on the subway saw a young child wearing blue clothes and the father put a Yankee hat on the head of the child.  The person on the subway assumed this was a young little boy until he noticed the shoes had some flowers and also the young child had pierced ears.  That is when he pieced it together and realized that the young child was indeed a little girl.  The subway rider assumed because of the colors of the clothes and the baseball hat that the child must be a boy but then the rider was proven wrong.  At that point the subway rider could have thrown out a lot of assumptions he made of the child once he realized he got the child’s sex incorrect. “You couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl. The child in the stroller was wearing a dark blue T-shirt and dark print pants. As they started to leave the train, the father put a Yankee baseball cap 011 the child's head. Ah, a boy, I thought. Then I noticed the gleam of tiny earrings in the child's ears, and as they got off, I saw the little flowered sneakers and lace-trimmed socks. Not a boy after all. Gender done.”

I am not too sure about my thoughts on social construction because I tend to look at things with an attitude like “that’s the way things are because that’s the way they are.”  I always have gone with the flow in life because I guess I have always been part of the groups of people that tend be on the more privileged side of life.  At home things have always been fairly traditional.  My brother and I always worked outside on the property with things such as landscaping or doing other manual labor that needed to be done.  On the flip-side my sister tends to work a lot inside with our mother on things such as dishes, food preparation, and other basic cleaning around the house.  I would say we all got thrown into those jobs because of our sex.  My brother and I are of course guys and we are both the stereotypical manly men that you would think of.  That may be because we were brought up to be that way because that is what is deemed to be normal where we are from.  My sister is the stereotypical teenaged girl.  She likes to cook food and keep things clean and organized.  This is probably because she was brought up to believe that is just the way things need to be done.  In today’s world you could easily flip the gender roles for working around the house.  Women could do a lot of the work that is done outdoors and men of course could cook and clean the inside.  Maybe in more progressive places like larger cities on the coasts there are cases that they do but that is not simply the case in western Nebraska where I am from.  It is pretty traditional there and not a whole lot has changed with social construction there.

Blog 4

Introduction

“As soon as he wakes up in the morning, Ronnie, an undergraduate student at a large, Midwestern research university, sends a tweet from his phone, which lets his roommates know he’s awake.” (p.9)

         This quote right here is the first sentences of Buck’s introduction.  When I first read this I found it to be much more interesting style of sentence than I had expected to start reading in a paper.  Not only did it catch my attention it also told me a lot of information about the person being observed.  We learned immediately that Ronnie constantly uses social media, even when he just wakes up.

“August 2011, 83% of 18–29 year-olds used a social network site (Madden, 2012). Their interactions on these sites were also purposeful, as Pew reports that this age group is that most concerned with online identity management: 71% of them have changed the privacy settings on the sites they use (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010)” (p.10)

         This statistic about 71% of this age group changing privacy settings on their social media websites to me was a bit interesting.  I know that many people change their privacy settings, delete many aspects of their online presence on websites, or delete social media altogether when they graduate from college and look for new jobs.  The reason for this is because they all know many employees go online and search the person out on social media websites.  The people that delete their accounts feel potential employees may be a bit nosy but the employee is also just trying to be thorough in their decision to hire someone or not to.  Both sides have strong arguments on that topic I believe.

Methods

“Criteria for participation in this study included a strong presence on social network sites, as judged by an up-to-date profile and daily participation on a social network site and participation in a writing-intensive course.” (p.12)

This was the absolutely most important thing about this study that was being done.  There needed to be a participant that was involved on social media frequently.  I think many of us in the class are finding some aspects of this assignment to be difficult because some do not use social media.  Since starting this project my partner has had no post updates on her twitter account and I have had very few.  If we both were heavy users of the website this project would possibly been easier for the both of us to start in the least.

“The research interviews, for example, allowed me to gauge my own interpretations of comments Ronnie posted online, as well as to gain background information unavailable in the textual activity I recorded.” (p.13)

This little quote was about when she conducted her own profile tour with Ronnie.  I liked that she did that because she was able to get a better understanding about him and how uses the social media websites he uses.

Results

“The information he shared on Twitter varied widely, such as updates on what he’s listening to, thoughts and musings on his way to class, images from his daily life, and questions to his friends about weekend plans or other topics. Some of these tweets were updates on his mood and daily activities:” (p.15)

These sentences were a lead up to a few example tweets of Ronnie’s.  As you can tell by the description here, Ronnie used twitter for just about anything.  This resembles how I used to use twitter when I was a younger college student.  At the time many people were newer to twitter and weren’t quite sure what they should or shouldn’t post on there.  It reminds me a bit of an older television commercial where a dad is sitting on a couch and he felt he needed to update his twitter and tell everyone he was sitting on the couch. 

“He checked Twitter constantly from the website, seeing it as a habit, part of his daily routine, and something he did when he was bored:” (p.22)

This describes myself in a lot of ways.  If I am sitting around in a classroom waiting for class to start and I happen to be on my phone, chances are I am reading something on twitter.  I find myself reading different news articles or just seeing what the new developing gossip is from the last time I checked which was probably just a couple of hours before.

Discussion

“Over the course of the study, Ronnie began to have serious concerns about privacy and ownership of his information on Facebook” (p.31)

This is something that I have always thought about too when I used to be more involved with social media.  It’s a bit scary at times knowing that people trust random websites online with their information.  A while back I’ve gotten rid of facebook just because I didn’t want some random person to be able to look me up and find out things such as where I am from, where I go to school, and where I live.  I prefer to keep a lot of things in my life private between friends and family and off of the Internet.

“Facebook used to include certain default fields on one’s profile where individu- als defined themselves primarily by the consumption of various media, listing favorite music, movies, television shows, and favorite quotations and writing an open description in the About Me section.” (p.33)

Similar to Ronnie, I was never one to fill these boxes out either.  I have always found those sort of questions like “favorite movie” to be a bit odd and difficult to answer.  While I do have an all time favorite movie (Tommy Boy), it may not be my current favorite watch.  Questions like favorite quote I would have no issue filling out but other things such as music, movies, books are a bit tough to answer because there can be many.

Conclusion

“Ronnie represents a rather extreme case of social network site use, both through the number of sites he used and the amount of activity he engaged in on each site.” (p.34)

Once again it would be easier to do this study if we all were more active on social media websites.  In Buck’s case, she hit a gold mine with Ronnie and how active he was on social media.  I found Ronnie to be a bit of an extreme case though.  He stayed up with his normal activities such as being with friends and studying, but it also seemed social media was a bit too infused with his normal everyday life. 

“The online activity that individuals engage in on social network sites does not just stay online” (p.35)

This is absolutely true and this is really evident in college classrooms amongst the students I believe.  Many times college students become friends on websites such as facebook just for the sole purpose to communicate about certain classes they may be in together.  When I was a member of the website I know that I used to add people I met in class on there as they would me just so it was easier to communicate about the class.  Our online conversations became part of our conversations we may have had in the classroom the following day.  Social media has become such a large part of many people’s lives that it is often a central piece of in person conversations when you meet up with someone.

Blog 3

How often do you post updates compared to the amount of times you only read through other people’s updates?

Are the people you follow all tired into a similar community?

How about the people that follow you?

How do you utilize hash tags or the trending topics?

What devices do you use to check twitter? Which device do you use the most and why?

You don’t post often, how do you decide when to post?

You profile says you joined April 2012. What social network did you use then and are you still active on those?

Why did you make a twitter?

Is it what you expected to get from it?

In your biography you say that you’re a Georgia Peach but then I saw accounts related to Bellevue East follow you. Will you explain what that is all about?

I noticed a few different Billy Madison references on your feed.  Is that a movie you have always enjoyed and why do you choose to post those references?

How do you choose to post the picture that you do post?

What is the most important aspect of your twitter account: socializing, keeping up with people you’re a fan of, or staying current with news?

There are a lot more retweets on your profile compared to your original postings. How similar are the things you retweet compared to your personality on and off of social medias?