HW 27: Annotated Bib for Baghdad Burning

Riverbend. Baghdad Burning. New York, NY. The Feminist Press, 2005

This is a book comprised of blogs written by a young woman living in Iraq. She writes as frequently as she can and has a very smart and understanding view on the politics surrounding her. The book goes into her life and she takes you with her throughout her experiences with this war going on between America and Iraq. This book fits into our course perfectly because she is a woman who is blogging to make a difference not just for herself but for others as well. It is also very eye-opening to the politics of our country and how other people see our country. I’m sure there will be some in our course reading this who will take offense, but I will not be one of them. What I hope to get out of it is a clearer understanding of a first hand account of this war. It puts a face to a faceless bunch of people who are being victimized by this war.

HW 25: Overview of the Overview

The forward to, Baghdad Burning by Riverbend is written by Ahdaf Soueif. The introduction is written by James Ridgeway. The forward is a brief overview if you will on the book. She talks about what is important in the book, like saying that it has a lot of politics in it but that it is interesting because it isn’t ideological but different because it is a first hand account of someone experiencing those politics. She talks about what this book should do for people which is basically to open their eyes to this war which isn’t happening to all of us like it is to Riverbend. The introduction goes more into depth about specifics to the book like who Riverbed is and where she lives. It also gives short narratives on the Gulf War and the 2003 war. It also gives Iraq’s history very briefly. My own views on this war are probably very similar to Riverbend’s. Soueif’s and Ridgeway’s. I am very much against it and the Bush administration in general. We have witnessed extreme and horrible atrocities in the past six or seven years and I feel like all of it is for the wrong reasons. Of course what Soueif and Ridgeway have laid out is a very different account than what most people learn in their history classes, but I have been fortunate enough to be in college for most of this and have seen and heard the real story.

HW 23: Chasms of Deep Worry

With Apologies to Virginia Woolf:
What is it about fiction and women that makes it oh so easy to disregard the work of them? I have been pondering that question as of late and have stumbled upon no good or easy answers. This blog post about different authors and texts for boys and girls it makes one think of seeking truth. Truth in all matters of genders, here or now. Boy children get to read about adventure and politics and mere girl child of love and house. What of it that we can’t read the same text, this question is one that I seek answer to. One might think this is a pattern of yesteryear, but think again for it is now on the blog, Collected Voices, http://collectedvoices.blogspot.com/2007/10/not-for-girls-how-teachers-are-limiting.html that you may find this troubling piece that so accurately depicts the chasm between the sexes. It is also troubling to think that women have been forced into little spaces where they may only write of love or stories with no wit or humor. “Happily my thoughts were now given another turn” (Woolf 77).

HW 22: Mars...Patriarchy is alive and well here

In Virginia Woolf’s novel, A Room of One’s Own she talks about how if someone from another planet were to pick up one of our newspapers it would be plain to see that our world is ruled by patriarchy (Woolf 33). She gives examples about how everything is owned by men and as a result everything but the cloudy forecast is controlled by them. She makes reference to this power as their way of holding on to the control and influence and illustrates how when they write about women’s inferiority they seem angry, and that anger must have to do with trying to keep their power away from women. When I checked out the Boston Globe for the same results I also found that even in this day and age someone could plainly see that men still have the majority of the power, money, and influence. Most of the stories were about men and their political power or their money making ways, and when there were stories about women it was about a teacher, and everyone knows teachers don’t have any money…

HW 21: Dear Little Cousin

Dear little cousin,
My understanding of Virginia Woolf’s novel, or at least the first chapter in, A Room of One’s Own is that she is talking about the inequities of women writers to men. She gives some examples like when she is sitting by the river gathering her thoughts to write, but she gets interrupted by a man who goes to that college and she is a woman and isn’t supposed to be there. My thought is that she feels like she is excluded from certain things because she is a woman and isn’t allowed access to what the men have access to. Another thing she talks about is literally having a room of her own to be able to write in. She talks about how you have to be able to afford that room and a lot of times women can’t afford that room like men can. I think this piece is important to people because she was ahead of her times in talking about sexism and about the things she couldn’t do because she was a woman.

HW 19: How Important are Blogs to the Media?

My chosen section of the piece, Web of Influence written by Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell in Blog! How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture by David Kline and Dan Burstein is about how the blogosphere influences what the media covers. They address how if the blogosphere wasn’t around the media often wouldn’t cover the stories that people are actually interested in. Consider for example in 2004 a writer for WomensWallStreet.com posted online her account of suspicious activity by Syrian passengers on board an airplane she was on and her absolute terror in not knowing whether or not they were a risk to her safety. Even more important 2 million people read her blog and soon thereafter media outlets like NPR, MSNBC, Time, and the New York Times picked up the story and prompted a national debate about the racial profiling that airlines were doing post 9/11. In short whether they like it or not personal opinion and commentary are important things for the media to consider and blogs will have a compelling effect on what the media covers.
http://Womenswallstreet.com

HW 18: The Diet and Fashion Industry are to Blame for Your Anorexia

I chose Understanding Anorexia: A Thin Excuse by Naomi Hooke in the Blog, Feministing as my least favorite Blog of the week. This post was basically saying that you can’t blame the fashion industry and their anorexic models for the prevalence of anorexia. She states, “To believe that the fashion industry causes eating disorders is to completely misunderstand this most complex of illnesses” and then later, “The vast majority of eating disorder patients have numerous other difficulties, including low self-esteem or confidence, lack of self-care, and social difficulties” (Hooke 1). Basically what she is arguing here is that the media and fashion industry have nothing to do with her disease. Although it is commonly understood here in America and according to Terry Poulton who wrote No Fat Chicks, “Nearly 30,000 women stated, in the largest such survey to date, that they’d rather lose weight than achieve any other goal-despite the fact that only 25 percent were overweight and another 25 percent were actually underweight” (Poulton 13). In a country where the diet industry is raking in $50 billion plus a year trying to make us all, thin or not, diet you just can’t ignore their influence. In fact Poulton points out, “Most Americans alive today have no memory of a time when thinness was not a national obsession, and thus regard the artificial as normal (Poulton 13). Hooke is saying that her disease can be blamed on her low self-esteem and confidence, but what she is forgetting to do is to look at why her self-esteem is so low. It is the job of the media and the diet industry together to make her feel bad about herself so that she will spend all of her time and money at trying for an unattainable goal.
www.feministing.com

HW 17b: Where Do You Go For Political Advice?

I would definitely use Daily Kos as opposed to Wonkette for helping me decide who to vote for in the upcoming election. The Wonkette site is more tongue in cheek, sarcastic stuff and Daily Kos is more serious and scholarly, easier to trust. Wonkette is more about gossip and who is screwing who than about the candidates in the upcoming election. Ana Marie Cox evens says it in an interview in a book by Dan Burstein and David Kline called, Blog! How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture, “Wonkette is me after too many margaritas” (Cox 57). She doesn’t think the quality of blog writing is very good and argues that it is a creative output and that most often that is just not any good either. Daily Kos on the other hand takes themselves very seriously and they work to mobilize the politically active so that they can use their influence to win the upcoming election. I think the Wonkette is great for a laugh and some interesting tidbits, but when you want to get serious about the election I would head to Daily Kos.

HW 17: Issues such as these need all the attention they can get!

I chose Broadsheet to look for my favorite post of the week and I found a post called, Planned Parenthood Will See You Now written by Lynn Harris. I really enjoyed this post because in a world where the mainstream media is being tightly controlled this type of article is just what we need. It highlights the problems women are facing getting affordable healthcare, let alone being able to walk into a clinic without getting harassed. Planned Parenthood’s president Cecile Richards explains that, “We are concerned that the struggles the Aurora center faced in opening may be reflective of a growing battle against politics trumping health care, and increased barriers to reproductive health care access” (qtd. in Harris). In making this comment Richards calls attention to the increasing politicizing of healthcare and how detrimental that is to Americans who really need medical attention. It is so important that these types of issues get the attention they deserve so kudos to Broadsheet!
http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2007/10/03/aurora_clinic_opens/index.html

HW 16: Broadsheet Follows the Rules

I looked into the Broadsheet blog and tried to see if they were following Robert Scoble’s Corporate Weblog Manifesto. It’s a little hard to say if they are following the principles because it is not a blog about a product or company, it’s a blog about news and politics, community, opinion etc. I think perhaps there needs to be a different set of principles for blogs that aren’t about businesses. I think there are a few that coincide like using a human voice, I think on the Broadsheet blog they do that very well they don’t try to sound like a newspaper or magazine, they use their real voice which does help speed up the process I’m sure. Also they have links to their “competitors” namely other blogs similar to theirs. They have the title as “Blogs We Read” which is a nice touch because it gives the blogs importance. It’s a way of being nice and saying nice things about them. Again it’s hard to say what standards they aren’t following because they aren’t really promoting their business, they are a community.

HW 14: What Newspaper Are You Reading?

In reading Blog! How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business and Culture I came across an interview with Nick Denton called, Take an Obsession and Feed It. Although it is true that he argues, “I don’t think anyone is going to replace, anytime soon, the role of The New York Times in providing, for example, reporting from Baghdad” (Denton 156) he is saying that blogs provide a different service. As an illustration he says that blogs will have an edge in helping people decide what they want to read and what they think is important nationally. As a result people won’t be as loyal to one newspaper, they can mix and match stories according to what’s important to them. For instance what people are doing with TiVo, they are creating their own TV channel in essence and that is what we can do with blog reporting.