Janetnews.com Blog

Teenagers, according to the Pew Interent and American Life project, like instant messaging to e-mail.

And who says the Internet is male dominated… The survey found that girls 15-17 are power users.

Teens spurn e-mail for messaging

WHAT TEENS DO ONLINE
Send or read e-mail: 89%
Visit websites about TV, music or sport stars: 84%
Play online games: 81%
Online news: 76%
Send or receive instant messages: 75%

I highly recommend listening to this report on Arab Blogs. It’s very interesting on how Arabs just want a voice just as we do in America. Arab bloggers say it’s liberating.

NPR : Going Online for News, Love and Democracy

The number of Arabs using the Web is still small compared to America, but it’s growing all the time. Islamic extremists recruit members and spread hatred via the Web — and get the headlines — but far more people in the Arab world are using the Internet to connect and share information.

Today in my Feminist Rhetoric class, we were talking about empowering nurses with knowledge. Then I found this interesting study on gender issues in nursing. Men nurses usually specialize in mental health, accident and emergency care. Also, the article says that people tend to take bad news from a man better. The article says,
“I think people prefer to be given bad news by a man rather than a woman - it seems as if they are being taken more seriously,” one said. The article goes on to say that men nurses will change their job title if they are asked what they do in a pub. They want to play down the feminine side of their job. Another interesting point this article says, is that MEN are moving away from the subordinate role of a nurse and increasing their credibility to that of a doctor.

SocietyGuardian.co.uk | Health | Men ‘winning’ caring profession sex war

Men working in traditionally female-dominated caring professions such as nursing and teaching are winning a new gender war with their female colleagues, according to a study.

Research from Brunel University’s business school found that men in caring careers believe they get more respect and more challenging roles than their women counterparts.

So how do women feel when they are faced with a job that is predominately a male’s job? I doubt they feel like they have to change their job title in a pub. The sad part of this article is that they say that men are “winning” the caring profession sex war. Who knew? You would almost think the female nurses would be the ones fighting.

The SWECJMC (Southwest Education Council for Journalism and Mass Communication) Conference is coming up November 4-5 at the Univeristy of Northern Colorado in Greely, Colorado. Paper submission deadline is August 16.

Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France for the seventh time in a row!

Armstrong Ends Career With Seventh Tour de France Win

PARIS, July 24 - Once more, and for the last time, Lance Armstrong swept into Paris today as the winner and undisputed champion of the Tour de France.

Protected in the middle of his Discovery Channel team on his way to victory and retirement, Armstrong finished the last of 21 daily stages and mounted his final podium after a day of intermittent cold rain.

I read this article about Stephanie Klein’s blog on NYTimes.com. It’s fascinating that her blog took off as is did and what did she write about, she wrote about her life. Now if I did that everyone would start yawning and tell me to GET a life! Ok, school consumes my time and yes, my life is boring with no dates or entertainment activities that are really worth mentioning. But, one of the things I am interested in studying is why people blog and you must read stephanie’s explaination… it’s because she loves to write and wanted to become noticed.

I turn to the Professional Writer’s Consortium that Dr. Burns is teaching this summer session. The first thing he says is to find your niche and a venue. Stephanie did just that. She started a blog and it escalated from there and now, a publishing deal! Way to go Stephanie! So, maybe I won’t get a book deal with my blog, but that’s ok. I plan on my dissertation to become a part of a book I will write one day. I just think it’s neat when a writer can take a forum, like a blog, and make it their own and become famous for it.

Reader, I Dated Him

Since Jan. 20, 2004, Ms. Klein, a 29-year-old art director with freckles and long red curls like Botticelli’s Venus, has been blogging about the intimate details of her life, from her affinity for rainy days and grilled cheese sandwiches to her sexual escapades, including one that involved a stranger and a can of Pam cooking spray.

Today the blog has an international readership with fans who recognize Ms. Klein when they see her gallivanting around Manhattan and the Hamptons, and who find parallels to their own lives in her candid, freewheeling stories.

The NYTimes.com has an interesting story about the traditional media and bloggers.

Bad News

What really sticks in the craw of conventional journalists is that although individual blogs have no warrant of accuracy, the blogosphere as a whole has a better error-correction machinery than the conventional media do. The rapidity with which vast masses of information are pooled and sifted leaves the conventional media in the dust. Not only are there millions of blogs, and thousands of bloggers who specialize, but, what is more, readers post comments that augment the blogs, and the information in those comments, as in the blogs themselves, zips around blogland at the speed of electronic transmission.

This means that corrections in blogs are also disseminated virtually instantaneously, whereas when a member of the mainstream media catches a mistake, it may take weeks to communicate a retraction to the public. This is true not only of newspaper retractions - usually printed inconspicuously and in any event rarely read, because readers have forgotten the article being corrected - but also of network television news. It took CBS so long to acknowledge Dan Rather’s mistake because there are so many people involved in the production and supervision of a program like ”60 Minutes II” who have to be consulted.

Conventional journalists are skeptical of the ethical quality of blogging. But, one may be surprised how information can be filtered through and as a community outting the false information immediately.

This is exactly how I feel when I read Harry Potter, I feel like I am 10 discovering a new book…

‘Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince’: Her Dark Materials

To read Rowling’s novels as an adult is to sink into a half-remembered state of childhood rapture, the trance produced when you gobbled up fantasies for the first time. In the series’s fourth volume, ”Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” Dumbledore lets Harry stumble across the Pensieve, a collecting dish for excess memories. To extract a memory, a wizard holds a wand to his temple, draws a silvery strand of thought from his head and taps it into the basin. Any wizard who touches the swirling contents of the bowl drops into the visions it contains, reliving them as if he had been present at their inception. Dipping into the fiction that is Rowling’s Pensieve, adult readers tumble into an eerie but familiar realm, containing not only Rowling’s images of Harry but their own memories of books they loved when they were Harry’s age and younger.

If anyone would like to know what I study in grad school, one must read my horoscope for today:

Scorpio:

One of your many specialties is the art of persuasion. You can talk just about anyone into just about anything — if they’re still breathing, at least. So now, when you’re feeling the need to communicate something important to someone equally important — to convince someone of something you know they need to know — there’s really no way for you to fail. Unless, of course, they leave the vicinity or are already committed to holding their breath for a very long time.

Yes, one of the definitions I use for Rhetoric is the “art of persuasion.” I guess my horoscope is telling me I’m in the right field of study!

Before we get into deconstructing Harry Potter, let me define phenomenology:

According to The Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory by J. A. Cuddon, Phenomenology is:

A method of philosophical inquiry which lays stress on the perceiver’s vital and central role in determining meaning.

The Phenomenology of Harry, or the Critique of Pure Potter - New York Times

Leafing through the other academic essays in this collection, one discovers that the Harry Potter series also embodies many of the 10 basic elements of Otto Rank’s ”hero myths,” not to mention the 31 ”functions” or characteristics of classic folktales as delineated by the Russian structuralist Vladimir Propp.

And what are fairy tales if not allegories of real life? ”The Harry Potter novels are among the most politically engaged novels to have been written for children in recent years,” writes Brycchan Carey, a lecturer at London University, providing ”a site for discussion of a democratic society’s response to elitism, totalitarianism, and racism.”