Saturday, April 28, 2007

Prejudice is a disease we can never get rid of. Discuss.

I strongly agree that prejudice is a disease we can never get rid of. Prejudice is the preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience. People often judge others by appearance, then form critical judgments in their minds and more often than not, stereotyping occurs and these are usually negative views of others, thus giving rise to prejudice.

There are many forms of prejudice and the most common form of prejudice is racism. Just because of the difference in skin colors for some, they are being discriminated and given unfair treatment. This is especially so in the USA, where the Blacks are often seen as the more likely criminals. The Whites on the other hand, are often seen as the civilized and law-abiding citizens. However, statistics have proven that actually, 97 percent of the crimes in USA are committed intra-racially. Even so, the people in the United States did not change their perceptions. This is because the idea of the Blacks being the bad guys is lodged so strongly in their heads already, and this is exactly why prejudice can never be removed completely.

Parents will always reinforce the idea that the certain parties are always the bad guys. One example would be that we will always associate terrorists with Muslims due to the September 11 incident. Thus children grow up with that specific mindset that some parties are just the bad guys. It will be hard to change their thinking as they have spent so many years accepting these ideas. Furthermore, they would have been taught that their parents are always right so they will accept those ideas of prejudice readily. These children will also reinforce these ideas to their own children and this then becomes a never ending cycle. Hence, prejudice can never be gotten rid of.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

YOUTUBE QUESTION 1

Youtube has been very popular among teens and even adults now, as it has many drama videos and mtvs available for free. So the big question is does youtube really have no ethics and is created just for money and entertainment? The answer is a NO, though it does have some videos that are unethical.

In actual fact, youtube has not been making much money because, in order to turn youtube into a profitable corporation, the people who came up with it has to go through a lot of tedious work such as legal disputes. They also must find a way maintain their unique identity without getting swallowed up by Google. Hence, the owners of this web did not turn it into a profitable corporation. So how can it be said that youtube is created for the sole purpose of money? If that was really the case, I am sure the owners would have gone through all the tedious work just to earn large amounts of money. Furthermore, youtube is not just for entertainment purposes. The videos uploaded actually have educational values too. According to newscientist.com, YouTube has hosted a wide variety of clips offering tips about how to deal with medical issues. Hence people who wish to find out more about health issues can go to youtube and get these educational videos they need.

Also, youtube does not have overtly-sexual videos. They are being removed from youtube once they are discovered. So this shows that youtube does have some ethics. The argument for youtube having no ethics would be the recent issue regarding the video which was offensive to the Thai king. However, it would be very unfair to youtube by saying it has no ethics at all based on this one video and this sort of incidents do not happen often. Hence I feel that youtube is not created for the sole purpose of entertainment and money and does have some ethics.