Recently someone hacked into the database at UCLA and stole personal identity information for potential identity theft. While it scares me in the first place to have my credit card and social security information in databases and on the internet, I recently had an unsettling experience concerning databases and the internet. I got a letter in the mail from this online company that I had bought something from online. Apparently someone breached the security of their online database and stole thousands of names, addresses and their corresponding credit card information. Mine was a part of this database so they told me to check over all my credit card statements, inform my credit card company and accept their apology. While I don't know much about hacking or really even computers in general, I was pissed at this company for not taking the proper security measures to protect their databases and their customers.

I’m writing my final paper for my Race Theory in Media course on racial and gender representations in contemporary mainstream television, with a focus on Grey’s Anatomy. Since I know it’s a popular show, it’s interesting for me to hear people’s opinions about the representations. So, if you love the interracial relationship between Burke and Cristina or are intrigued by the fact that the show has women in power, I’d love to hear input.

The show is particularly intriguing in how it interconnects all of the elements of race, class, gender, and sexuality and while it is praised for all of these various representations, the program upholds many ideologies that have negative affects on various groups. The show appeals to a large variety of people because it presents an assortment of races and genders in significant roles. Grey’s Anatomy successfully integrates genders and races into a mainstream, popular show. However, it is interesting that despite the vast representations, the cast’s gender and racial differences are not a central focus. This is acceptable because the characters and the relationships attract audiences and their races are incidental. The cast’s race is not directly addressed and it is embraced by many people who can relate to the various cast members.

Piggybacking off of ofcabbagesandkings's earlier blog, Why am I a major in Media Studies?? It’s a kinda weird story actually. I came in to college as a chemistry and marine biology major. What changed that??? I don’t know. Actually, 4 hour chemistry labs probably had a lot to do with it. Some of it was also probably not having an outlet for creativity in the areas I was studying. Studying chemical equations made me miserable and I hated not being able to input my opinion into any of it. Memorizing equations and how to complete formulas was just not what I wanted to do for four years of my life.

While I came home with every intention of working on my project right at 10 pm and putting finishing touches on it tonight, I was, alas, entrapped in this television show that one of the ladies in my apartment was watching and now I have something to blog about, but no real progress on that whole project thing. Either way, I guess it's beneficial for this course, so it's only a little bit bad.

The show was a special investigation done by ABC Primetime News entitled Basic Instincts: What Would You Do? It’s a Candid Camera type show, but with socially taboo or unacceptable situations, not comedic situations. The whole idea is even if people are morally against certain issues in society, most of the time they won’t speak out against them in specific social situations. Here are the examples that I saw from tonight’s show (I guess it is a limited series).

I've never actually played this game, so some of what I tell you in this blog may be slightly incorrect, but part of me is simply wondering if anyone has played this. In my Race Theory in the Media course, we have to do a final paper and present what we are discussing to the class. A fellow student in my course recently presented about an interactive video game called Indigo Prophecy (XBox). It is also known as Fahrenheit. My classmate described it as a combination of narrative film and video game.

Basically, the player is the main character (Lucas) and makes decisions for the character which change the outcome of the narrative. The game starts with Lucas waking up from a trance after just killing someone. He has to figure out why he killed them before he is arrested. So the opening scene has the player (as Lucas) cleaning up the crime scene. However, the amount of clean-up the player does effects the outcome of the story after that. The person playing the game has several different choices about what to do in each scenario and each choice effects the outcome of the game. Like I said, I've never played, but it sounded pretty interesting. And pretty relevant to our discussions about narrative and video games. According to my peer it received a lot of praise for attempting to reinvent this genre of video games and it is pretty interesting. Just wondering if anyone has ever played before or knows anything about it...

Just an interesting article I thought I should share after our discussion last week. We discussed copyright laws of books, but apparently a lot of music artists would like to extend the time frame on music copyrights. Since there is such a large industry in re-releasing old hits or remaking old hits, copyright laws are clearly important for the music industry. The article connects the recent use of downloading as a source of consumption of music to copyright laws, somewhat unclearly. Anyway, it's interesting and you should all check it out.

I found this quote most interesting and relevant:

I am currently in this weird documentary stage of my Netflix, why I have no idea. My recent documentary, The Future of Food worried me a bit. Sure, I've heard all the 'eat organic foods' speeches and yeah, I shop at Trader Joe's sometimes, but I feel that the film should have scared me much more. I wanted an expose on all the crap the dining halls are feeding us. All it really did was make me feel as though I was watching the film in a high school biology or ecology class or something.

First of all, I guess I was expecting to see something like Fast Food Nation (which is now I film, that I haven't seen but I've read the book). What I got was a lesson in genetics and how big companies, such as MONASTO - the makers of Round-up, make genetically altered seeds and then put patents on them so that farmers can't use their seeds. While it is all a bit complicated, basically the big companies sue any farmers whose seeds have any genetic make-up related to their genetically altered seeds. Due to seeds easily spreading (through wind, animals, what have you), cross-polination occurs rapidly and basically all plants become altered with some part of these genetically-engineered seeds.

Recently I had a very intelligent lunch conversation with peers about the MTV show Punk'd. For those of you who don't know, Punk'd is a show that Ashton Kutcher started that is kind of similar to Candid Camera, but with celebrities. Kutcher hires actors to put celebrities in really ridiculous situations and usually worries them or makes them very angry and then walks out and laughs at them.

Anyway, our conversation began because someone had recently seen an episode in which Ellen Pompeo (Meredith Grey on Grey's Anatomy) was punked and said some pretty weird things. The episode involved a waitress (actress) hitting on Pompeo's fiance while serving them lunch. Pompeo goes on to say some pretty malicious stuff about stabbing the woman and watching her bleed everywhere. Pretty weird. The link to that on YouTube is here:

While I am here on campus working on my thesis, I read an interesting article that relates to this course. My thesis is on hip-hop music and I recently read the article "Who(se) Am I? The Identity and Image of Women in Hip Hop" by Imani Perry. While the majority of the article is about feminist lyrics, the objectification of women in Hip Hop, and female stars that are the exception to the objectification, there was an interesting section about the music industry and the authorship of the music.

I wanted to write about the corporate creations of music artists. Especially with Hip Hop music there is a standard image that sells well and that the corporations want their artists to be in order to sell records. In the beginning, Hip Hop was a form of honest self-expression. Before it became an extreme commodity, it was a way for a group of marginalized people to speak out against their oppression. Perry's article describes how the 'realness' of contemporary Hip Hop artists is completely created by the corporation. Teams of people go into creating the image of an artist.

An interesting article about the Chinese bans on Wikipedia:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/11/17/china.internet.ap/index.html

It seems so weird to me, since in the US you can basically find anything on the internet, despite some censorship. Freedom of speech is a huge debate in China, for fear of discussion of politically banned issues. There is apparently a lot of censorship of the internet access in China and I just found it interesting how much the Chinese government decides whose opinions can be expressed and what is inappropriate to put on the internet. Anyway, the topic is interesting, but if you don't want to read the whole thing (a whole 3 minutes of reading); here is the part I found most interesting: