Author: ianwilliams13

Annotated Bibliography-Research

References

  • Holt, L. J., Bry, B. H., & Johnson, V. L. (2008). Enhancing school engagement in at-risk,

urban minority adolescents through a school-based, adult mentoring intervention. Child & Family Behavior Therapy, 30(4), 297-318. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07317100802482969

  • Vines, G. (2005). Middle schooling counseling: Touching the souls of
  1. adolescents. Professional School Counseling, 9(2), 175-176. Retrieved fromhttp://search.proquest.com/docview/621024276?accountid=14902
  • Yu, J. W., Adams, S. H., Burns, J., Brindis, C. D., & Irwin, C. E. (2008). Use of mental

health counseling as adolescents become young adults. Journal of Adolescent Health, 43(3), 268-276. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2008.01.009


My cover letter…

            This class has been one of the better English classes I have taken in my life, on the basis of how much I have learned and been able to grow from it. In the past I have looked at my writing and communication in such a one sided and boring way, I have never been able to discover the many aspects of it. To me, writing was fun when it was a topic I was interested in, but now even the topics that I care less about I am still able to give a good amount of effort and thought into it because I can make it personal and put emotion into it.

            The first blog post we wrote about was to define communication in the 21st century and that has changed in the way that I can now see all forms of communication and how they have and can affect the people that use them. In my first blog post, a lot of my emphasis was on cellular devices and social networking and how they have affected my life and the lives of my generation. They are a huge part of communication today but I only saw them from my eyes and how my friends and I have used them. Then we watched Ze Frank’s TED talk and my understanding of communication and what it’s used for began to change. He showed several ways to use communication that I had never thought about, my favorite being the earth sandwich. He got people to communicate across the world in an extremely unique way, he got two people from across the world to place a piece of bread on the ground so they perfectly across from each other and it is amazing. My understanding of communication has evolved and I am able to identify and use other forms that bring out creativity and appeal to more than just my friends or people I usually communicate with.

            My favorite blogs from this semester were easily the photo essay, both the written and visual parts, and the recreation of the advertisement. The recreation of the advertisement was so much fun because it brought out creativity that I didn’t know I had, and also because it was a unique project, something I haven’t done anything like. To take an advertisement and be able to create how I see it in my head is a fantastic assignment and I had a lot of fun with. The photo essay was one of my favorites because I told a story with pictures I took and created, it was my own and it was personalized. Also to be able to put more detail into my recreation of it by writing about it and demonstrate how I’ve been able to put my emotions into my writing. These are different from my least favorite blog, which was the research essay, because research is not something I particularly enjoy. The research essay was based off of a topic that I wanted to do but research is never really fun at all, however all the blogs I have written I have enjoyed more than most work that I have done for all my classes thus far, so the essay was not too bad. What made the other blogs better than the rest was that they were not only shorter, but they were unique and required me to pull out the creativity within me that I had no idea was there. Those blogs made me a better writer and thinker, not only towards writing papers or in English class, but overall.

            As a writer I have grown an immense amount and I have been able to notice this dramatically. In high school and even the first semester I believe I lacked emotion and the combination of being able to make my writing my own and staying on topic. It has always been hard for me to stay close to my topic because as I would continue to write I would fall away from the topic and end up writing about something almost completely irrelevant. I try to pride myself on being a better thinker than I am a writer but I have always had a problem on being able to bring my thoughts to life and express them. I feel that the blogs we have been doing, especially the photo essay and the recreation of an advertisement, have brought out my creativity and brought my thoughts to life. This semester has helped me grow and now I don’t feel as much like I have great thoughts but no way to bring them out because I can extract them from my brain and make them real. However, I am not much of an inventor just yet, I believe this is something I need to work on the most. The connection between my writing and my thinking needs to become stronger before I can invent anything. My creativity has come a long way but it is not where it needs to be for me to be able to completely bring everything to life and for me to completely express my emotions. This semester has turned me into a better thinker, writer, student, and a better person. It has been hard to find the motivation to go to class, to do my work, and to even get up at all sometimes and I feel that the writing has helped, if not a lot at least some. The class has helped me look at life in many ways, especially because of the TED talks, specifically Tony Robbins. There are so many great minds in the world and these talks put them on display for me and help me understand things about life I have a hard time understanding. This semester has been a lot of fun and I wish that I gave 100% of my effort, but I can say that I am happy I was a part of this class and that I can take many things that I have learned from this class and apply them towards life to make me a better person.     


Invention MOB….

Doing a project on one of the most controversial topics here at WSU was more interesting and eye opening for me than I thought it would be. I thought the information I would find and the people’s contributions towards our project, based off of the usage of drugs and alcohol, was incredible. In the beginning it was suppose to be a basic topic because of the amount of information we would be able to find on alcohol and drug use would be more than most topics. Washington State University has a high reputation for partying hard with drugs and alcohol, so there was an immense amount of information and plenty of opinions to be discussed. There were opinions on both sides of the spectrum, many believe there is too much and people need to be able to control their limit better, and others believe they are doing just fine.

            The purpose of this project was to collect as many statements and points of views from the college students and being able to understand their opinions better so we can help college students understand. We want them to know that they are not alone when it comes to too much drinking or too much drugs, and that they don’t have to continue those patterns. Also, it’s meant to get this information out to anyone that it could be useful for. There are kids, not only at WSU, but all over the country that don’t know how to control their alcohol and drugs and they have no idea that they can find a way to do so. Many friends of these people that can’t control themselves have no idea how to go about helping them and often don’t know how to approach them to tell them they are worried about them. This is a chance to either give a visual representation or write something to their friends and get it out of their system. Knowing that this is a very sensitive subject for many people and knowing that many people who believe they don’t go over the top, we had to go about this in a careful way. When asking people for their contributions, we had to make sure they felt comfortable and that they felt it was the right thing to do. We found that there are many friends that experience these feelings of anger, fear, and sadness so it was rather easy to get people to write down an experience, how they felt, and what they wanted to say to their friends.

            We pursued this topic because we knew that we would be able to get plenty of people to talk about it and contribute to this, especially since it is one of the biggest topics on campus and in college. Since this is one of the biggest topics we knew that there would be a lot of different opinions on this topic. There is the side of believing that there are too many people who get belligerently drunk and have no idea what’s going, pretty much their life is a blur. Then there is the side of believing that we are in college and experiencing this is a vital part to life and that it is a completely necessary part of going through college. Having an understanding of both sides of the spectrum is vital to doing this project because it makes helping other people understand.  Also, we have our own experiences with this so it is easier for us to understand people who give us contributions and want to be a part of creating awareness. I have plenty of friends that I have seen horrible things with them being beyond too drunk and it has hurt me because there are plenty of things that I wish I could have said to them and I regret not having the courage to be able to. This is true with my partner on this project as well and it makes it even easier because she has similar views on this.

            There was not much writing involved in this project, more of thinking about my writing and the possibilities of things I could write. Writing about the procedures and process of the project was interesting because of the things I have learned after doing this project. There was a contribution written and the girl was tearing up as she wrote it and it gave me a different perspective on drinking and drugs. I have learned so much from doing this project and being able to help write about it was an experience that I will not forget. I was able to write, and even write this with emotion which not only makes writing easier but it helps with the quality of my writing. My writing has grown, not a lot, but enough for me to recognize and it makes being able to write about most things much easier because I am able to put emotion and feeling into it. We used regular paper, were given pictures, or took pictures that expressed feelings that most people are not able to express on their own, they needed a little help and I feel that this project has been able to help. Many of these people had such an expression on their face when they were able to communicate such emotion through this project, and there are endless amounts of helpful facts that we were able to provide them with. This project is amazing because it reminds m of my favorite TED talk, which is Tony Robbins who is amazing at helping people. He talks about people being able to communicate with their emotions when they speak and how if they do that, they can get anything done. This is something I believe and am trying to figure out how to do myself, these people who write down their experiences with a friend who was to drunk or too high they communicate with emotions through their writing. Being able to read this and not only understand what they are saying, but to be able to feel their emotions is one of things that makes life worth living, it’s something that makes me proud of human beings. Many people talk about how as a species we are declining in quality and we getting worse and worse, but it’s examples like this that give me hope and faith. There are an extreme amount of drug addicts, alcoholics, and people who aren’t as extreme but can’t control their drugs and alcohol, and they scare me that maybe what people say is true, that as a species we are on the decline. But then there are people like the ones that have the courage to write down their experiences for others to see and help give them courage, and their ability to express their emotions and give faith to others. It’s these people that give me faith in human beings and help me have faith that we are not on the decline, that we are experiencing and learning from these experiences just as it should be. There would be no good without the bad and nothing would be so special if there weren’t the trials of life that gave us negative emotions, so I have been able to learn plenty from the people that gave their contributions and were willing to talk about the struggles of their friends.           


Research might be fun if I love the topic…

There are an endless amount of views on children’s mental health and there are an endless amount of arguments and struggles that this topic causes. More specifically in schools and the help that children may or may not be receiving and the problems this is causing. I have the same point of view as many, which is that children in both middle school and high school are not getting the right amount of help and many go unseen throughout school because they do not know how to ask for help and this a growing problem. Many believe that the school is giving enough help to children and there’s not much more to be done, some also believe that it is the parent’s responsibility to get their children help, or even that it is the child’s responsibility to ask for help. I disagree with many of these views, I agree on a small level that the parent’s should play a bigger part in getting their child help when they need it, but I believe, and so do many professionals, that there can be a great amount of improvement don’t within the schools and their ability to find kids that need help and to be able to give them the sufficient amount of help they need.

            I have a strong view on mental health with kids and the involvement of the education systems because they can have a strong affect and they can be a lot more involved than they are now. Laura Holt did an experiment where she took 20 at risk students and compared those students to 20 different at risk students, but these students received adult mentoring intervention. She found that the 20 at risk students who received the adult mentoring intervention “exhibited significantly less decline during the first year of high school in perceived teacher support and decision making and were less likely to enter the discipline system. (Holt, 2008) This is strong evidence to my belief in the fact that the schools can involve much more time into helping at risk students than they do. Being an at risk student throughout all of school I understand extremely well that it was hard for me to ask for help and I refused to go into a counseling office to talk to somebody, but I know that if they sought me out and asked me about things I would definitely be more inclined to talk. It is easier than it seems to seek out at risk students, many of them act out if defiant ways or refuse to participate in school and it tends to be obvious which students do so. I believe that there can be more programs implemented into school systems that can help, such as the one that Holt implemented, and I believe that positive results can come out of it. This tends to be controversial because people do not believe that the education systems can cause a positive difference because they do not have trust within the education systems. There are so many variables within the systems that make it hard to believe, but by making any effort, such as implementing a mentor program, we can make changes in the at risk students lives and help them become and strive towards being a positive member and contributor of society.

            Another problem that schools face towards helping students with their mental issues is that counselors may not be taking their job as serious as it should be taken. When I was in high school my counselors were a joke because you could tell it was routine for them and whether you dropped out or became successful really didn’t matter to them because they would continue to get paid. I don’t believe this is the largest issue that we face towards helping at risk students but it definitely is a problem in the less prominent areas of the country. Gina Vines wrote about her experience and her motives as a middle school counselor and this is a prime example of what counselors and people who want to help adolescents with their lives should be like. “As a middle school counselor, I have the opportunity to truly touch the lives of this challenging group. (Vines, 2005)” This is something she said within her writing and it touched me because I wish that the counselors that tried to help me had this motivation. A prime example of what could be done to help at risk students, which is find people who take this job seriously and to them it is more than a job because they will take more care and have greater passion. To help students that don’t realize they need help and don’t want help is definitely one of the hardest jobs to attempt because having to help someone realize and see what they can’t see is near impossible. However it becomes easier when you have a passion such as Gina Vines does and this backs up what I have been trying to explain. That there is so much more that the schools can do to help students who need help, they could increase the qualifications to become a school counselor and make sure they know that helping kids is more than a job, but a decision to help save lives and have the courage to intervene into a life that needs help. It might be important to focus more on the areas of the country that have increased poverty because there are more at risk students in this area and they lack the most on people who are not scared to get involved in their lives and who will not leave when things get hard.

            A change happens with kids when they go from being in middle school to high school, which is the idea that they create in their head that they don’t need counseling, they’ve never been in counseling but now they need it less, or they will never need it at all. This becomes an extreme issue with kids because as they get older they understand these problems they face with greater and greater comprehension and it causes stress because they understand what’s happening, but not why. When they are in middle school and younger it seems like a problem but it will go away or it doesn’t have a great significance on their lives, but once they get into high school and become more exposed to more life experiences and they learn how to understand these situations it causes such negative emotions and horrible thoughts because they do not know how to guide themselves through this. I believe that their first year of high school is the most important area to begin helping at risk students because that is when they first start to shape themselves and the time they need the help the most. Jennifer Yu wrote about this specific topic and shows statistical data that she has collected that proves this point and backs it up extremely well. She shows the difference between students who received counseling as adults and students who did not receive counseling as adults. The students who received counseling had higher rates of students that got a high school diploma, got a college degree, and went on to make a higher annual salary. Students who received counseling also had lower rates of attempted suicide, less severe depression symptoms, and had less severe experiences after high school. This should be a point of emphasis when becoming a high school counselor and being able to find the students who believe they do not need help and offering that help and not forcing it on them, but to be persistent and to make sure they know you are there so in their greatest time of need they can come to you. Finding the at risk students in their first year of high school can be critical because it can either be the time of their life that destroys their future and any hope of finding knowledge to overcome the atrocities of life, or it can be the time of their lives where they learn and find the knowledge and gain the confidence to go through life and face these negative experiences knowing they can and will overcome them. So getting to these at risk students and helping them get the knowledge on how to deal with life before they can be ruined by all the negative forces that act upon them is critical and I believe that schools can do a better job of being involved.

            I don’t put all the blame on the schools and the amount of effort they have put into counselors and helping at risk students, but I do believe they play an extremely big part and can have a great affect than they actually do have. I provided examples of the programs that can be implemented into schools to help students who are in need and the positive results that can come from them. There are many programs that can be put into place, especially in higher poverty areas, that can take the amount of students who drop out and commit suicide and lower that number. Also, there is an example of a counselor who absolutely loves helping students who are in need, which is a great standard for what all counselors who plan to help students should be just like. If we set the standard higher than what it is now, I believe we can get the ball rolling and increase the amount of help at risk students receive. I have included my thoughts and information backing it on the best time to start helping at risk students, which would be their first year of high school if not sooner because it is the best time to start educating them on dealing with the trials of life and how to deal with their emotions in the best way, and to even turn these bad dealings and negative emotions into fuel to excel in life and to be more than just a statistic. There are many ways that schools can help at risk students and save them from a life of depression, it just needs to be recognized that what is going on in the schools right now is not enough and we need to make a change.               

References

  • Holt, L. J., Bry, B. H., & Johnson, V. L. (2008). Enhancing school engagement in at-risk,

urban minority adolescents through a school-based, adult mentoring intervention. Child & Family Behavior Therapy, 30(4), 297-318. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07317100802482969

  • Vines, G. (2005). Middle schooling counseling: Touching the souls of
  1. adolescents. Professional School Counseling, 9(2), 175-176. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/621024276?accountid=14902
  • Yu, J. W., Adams, S. H., Burns, J., Brindis, C. D., & Irwin, C. E. (2008). Use of mental

health counseling as adolescents become young adults. Journal of Adolescent Health, 43(3), 268-276. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2008.01.009


I gotta speak in front of people…

This TED talk is inspired by a man named Tony Robbins, he a life coach and the “why” guy. He strives to know why people do the things they do and what motivates them. After watching that it got me thinking of a specific aspect of that which is the mental health of our youth and how they are being treated. So often kids from ages 5 to 18 are not getting the right help they need when they face ultimate pain. This pain can consist of when your parents are facing divorce to losing your whole family in an accident and everything in between. There are so many examples of kids that have these issues and never speak up because they are either embarrassed or not wanting to deal with it all and it is going to hurt every single one of them. People seek significance in their life, and I feel that when kids face pain so severe they look for this significance in the wrong way. I have met people that have this pain and there are several things they do about it, they continue to lie about other troubles that happen when they really haven’t because they got so much attention from the real troubles they have so it’s all they know, or they can never talk about anything and fall into drugs, drinking, or violence. Tony Robbins said that the easiest way to get significance is through violence because it will always be there and you can always get a reaction. I have found this to be true first hand because where I come from that is exactly how people find their significance when they have pain, where I come from there are 13 year old kids walking around with guns and knives ready to find their significance. I feel that this directly relates to the help many of these kids needs at a younger age, if a young child sees his older brother hold a gun to a man’s head and get a reaction then that is all that kid will know as he grows up, and it will be what he relies on as he gets older and older. It will become harder to break as every year passes and then trying to break this viscous cycle at the age of 18 will be next to impossible. I believe we need get that help everywhere and maybe even put emphasis on the areas where it is most likely to happen. We as a society can make a change but it starts with the youth because they are our future and they are screaming for help, we just can’t hear them and they don’t know their screaming for our help. There needs to be more effort, time, and money put into this if we are going to be able to make any kind of change within the kids and being able to help them with their ultimate pain.   


Consumers these days…

As a consumer in today’s society it is a negative cycle of buying and hoarding items that we don’t need and generally never needed in the first place. It is a process that happens for the average consumer because many are not in any way conservative with the items they do have or with the money they spend on items they don’t need as opposed to using them on something they need critically. Based on my experiences as a consumer and being part of a generation that is everything but conservative, I have been able to step out of my shoes as a consumer and observe how others are exactly like me.

 Being the epitome of a  complicated consumer in contemporary society I am in a viscous cycle of repetitive buying and keeping items that are in no way important to me or to keep because just knowing myself that I have the top brand or the newest “thing” makes me happy and feel like I belong. Throughout my life I never had the chance to buy any of the newest things or get what was popular so I only had items vital to living. However as I got older I realized I could earn money for myself and gradually be able to buy things that other people had and help myself feel like I belong to society. As time went by and I got more responsibility and earned more money I began to fall into the cycle of buying things that were so unnecessary and then once I was done using them, which didn’t take long, I would put them in a drawer and they would sit. When I was in middle school to Converse Chucks had just come out and everybody got a pair so I decided I need one, I went out and bought a pair I thought I would absolutely love and once I got home I put them on and realized that I completely hated this pair of shoes. There are so many things I could have done to put the shoes to better use, such as taking them back and exchanging them for a different pair, giving them to someone who needed shoes, or even something creative. However I put them in my garage and they sat there until I left for college when I found them and saw that pair of shoes for the first time since I bought them. In society today it is almost as if most of what we consumer is based off of what majority of people like, like we don’t actually have an opinion on the item. We just really fall in love with them because we know the attention we will get once our friends will see them. At least that’s how it is for my generation, there have been countless times that people have an article of clothing and they don’t even know if they like it or not, but because they saw somebody on MTV with it on, it makes them go crazy for it. Many people are conditioned to do this because we learn it at such a young age and after that it all goes to hell and becomes that viscous cycle.

            One of the articles we read in class, “The Stranger Exchange” by Rachel Botsman really made me think about contemporary consumers in society today and forced a lot of self reflection upon myself. After reading that article and thinking about doing something so simple as setting up an old newspaper container and having people put items in it and then taking one for themselves is such a genius idea, but takes such little thought or effort. It is such a basic idea but people would never take the time to even give one thought towards it because we, as consumers, are so caught up in our cycle that we don’t realize the creative things we could and the helpful things we could do with items we no longer use. The idea of the stranger exchange, if it could be amplified and used across the country, or even the world, it could help with the useless consuming people do. It might not be able to get rid of consuming for no reason or consuming just to feel a part of something, but it could be such a positive form of recycle consumption. Getting rid of items that you don’t use to people who would not only use these items but appreciate them in a way that some people can’t. There was a blog I posted earlier and it was an image of an Android phone advertisement and it implied that it didn’t take a genius to both operate the phone and to choose it over an Iphone. This is more of a minuscule example but it is a prime example of why people consume no with motive other than to fit in or have the newest things. It makes you feel like you are smarter and more important than those that don’t own an Android, or own the Iphone and attempts to give a sense of power over those people. This is dangerous because just feeling like you have that power is something that people fiend and crave for their lives, it’s the search for ultimate power and feeling like you are more than the other people or the general consumer. However if you think about this it’s extremely dumb and useless, this is because just cause you have a different phone or a better phone doesn’t give you any power over anybody. It’s a psychological mind state that people keep themselves in to make day to day life better and makes them feel important. This is going to be and has been destructive to consumers around the world because it gives consumers a false identity and false sense of power over any one person.

            As a consumer, I am self destructive and destructive to other consumers because it is a self conscious need for power and not wanting to get rid of items that I spent money on even though I have no use for them. I believe that a quick way to help people with that could be the stranger exchange because it is a simple way to get rid of an item that you don’t need and possible even pick up an item that you could use. This would be hard however because it’s hard to get people to stop and actually think about their consumption in all senses, but I believe it is possible.       


Consumers these days…

As a consumer in today’s society it is a negative cycle of buying and hoarding items that we don’t need and generally never needed in the first place. It is a process that happens for the average consumer because many are not in any way conservative with the items they do have or with the money they spend on items they don’t need as opposed to using them on something they need critically. Based on my experiences as a consumer and being part of a generation that is everything but conservative, I have been able to step out of my shoes as a consumer and observe how others are exactly like me.

Being the epitome of a  complicated consumer in contemporary society I am in a viscous cycle of repetitive buying and keeping items that are in no way important to me or to keep because just knowing myself that I have the top brand or the newest “thing” makes me happy and feel like I belong. Throughout my life I never had the chance to buy any of the newest things or get what was popular so I only had items vital to living. However as I got older I realized I could earn money for myself and gradually be able to buy things that other people had and help myself feel like I belong to society. As time went by and I got more responsibility and earned more money I began to fall into the cycle of buying things that were so unnecessary and then once I was done using them, which didn’t take long, I would put them in a drawer and they would sit. When I was in middle school to Converse Chucks had just come out and everybody got a pair so I decided I need one, I went out and bought a pair I thought I would absolutely love and once I got home I put them on and realized that I completely hated this pair of shoes. There are so many things I could have done to put the shoes to better use, such as taking them back and exchanging them for a different pair, giving them to someone who needed shoes, or even something creative. However I put them in my garage and they sat there until I left for college when I found them and saw that pair of shoes for the first time since I bought them. In society today it is almost as if most of what we consumer is based off of what majority of people like, like we don’t actually have an opinion on the item. We just really fall in love with them because we know the attention we will get once our friends will see them. At least that’s how it is for my generation, there have been countless times that people have an article of clothing and they don’t even know if they like it or not, but because they saw somebody on MTV with it on, it makes them go crazy for it. Many people are conditioned to do this because we learn it at such a young age and after that it all goes to hell and becomes that viscous cycle.

One of the articles we read in class, “The Stranger Exchange” by Rachel Botsman really made me think about contemporary consumers in society today and forced a lot of self reflection upon myself. After reading that article and thinking about doing something so simple as setting up an old newspaper container and having people put items in it and then taking one for themselves is such a genius idea, but takes such little thought or effort. It is such a basic idea but people would never take the time to even give one thought towards it because we, as consumers, are so caught up in our cycle that we don’t realize the creative things we could and the helpful things we could do with items we no longer use. The idea of the stranger exchange, if it could be amplified and used across the country, or even the world, it could help with the useless consuming people do. It might not be able to get rid of consuming for no reason or consuming just to feel a part of something, but it could be such a positive form of recycle consumption. Getting rid of items that you don’t use to people who would not only use these items but appreciate them in a way that some people can’t. There was a blog I posted earlier and it was an image of an Android phone advertisement and it implied that it didn’t take a genius to both operate the phone and to choose it over an Iphone. This is more of a minuscule example but it is a prime example of why people consume no with motive other than to fit in or have the newest things. It makes you feel like you are smarter and more important than those that don’t own an Android, or own the Iphone and attempts to give a sense of power over those people. This is dangerous because just feeling like you have that power is something that people fiend and crave for their lives, it’s the search for ultimate power and feeling like you are more than the other people or the general consumer. However if you think about this it’s extremely dumb and useless, this is because just cause you have a different phone or a better phone doesn’t give you any power over anybody. It’s a psychological mind state that people keep themselves in to make day to day life better and makes them feel important. This is going to be and has been destructive to consumers around the world because it gives consumers a false identity and false sense of power over any one person.

As a consumer, I am self destructive and destructive to other consumers because it is a self conscious need for power and not wanting to get rid of items that I spent money on even though I have no use for them. I believe that a quick way to help people with that could be the stranger exchange because it is a simple way to get rid of an item that you don’t need and possible even pick up an item that you could use. This would be hard however because it’s hard to get people to stop and actually think about their consumption in all senses, but I believe it is possible.


Video games, that ish I don’t like continued…

I have been able to find nearly 20 items in my dorm room alone that I could not only live without, but most likely not even notice if it went missing. These consist of several pairs of shoes, an endless amount of cords in one of the drawers in my desk, and clothes in a box within my closet. However there are more things that I found that I could absolutely not live without which consists of my laptop, my cell phone, my television, and my headphones. Even though they seem like things that someone should not need, they are items that I need to be able to function from day to day. They keep me going and make life easier by giving me access to things such as mobile internet and even games. It is easy to fall into the negative effects of these items, which consists of letting it consume you and make you extremely dependent on them. Also by having the need to have the updated version of everything you have can become fatal because people spend so much unnecessary money on trying to have the newest thing. When in reality you’re only paying for a slightly bigger screen or making an item slightly more portable but not once paying for more content or more access to something someone else doesn’t have.

My photo essay is about a commodity that I think a lot of younger people have, especially college students, and that’s the problem of video games. I have had issues with this, even in high school, with not being able to do my homework when it was so much easier to play video games. It destroyed my GPA and stopped me from being able to do anything during the weekends because I got grounded for having such horrible grades. I know this is a problem throughout the United States because it is even happening to my little cousin right now and I think it’s hilarious because it’s like going back in time and watching myself go through it. Even now in college there are plenty of people I know that play video games instead of doing their homework. So in my photo essay, I am at first playing video games and it results in an F on my homework. The next part is me giving my video games away to a friend and having a hard time letting it go, but it results in me studying harder than I usually would because I don’t have access to video games anymore, and me getting an A on my math homework. It is kind of cheesy and cliche, but I feel like it is something that many college students can relate to and easily understand if they were to see it.