The Dark Side of the Internet
Statement of the Problem
The Internet has changed lives. It's fulfilling prophecies to be better than books, better than traditional reference material, and the next best thing since sliced bread. However, as with every other technological miracle, there are always drawbacks. I wanted to find out what people use the Internet for and the common problems that they have. I did this by making numerous observations, conducting interviews, and distributing questionnaires.
After encountering repeated difficulties both on my home computer and at school, I decided to find out what other people thought about the Internet. I heard many friends and family members frequently complain about their difficulties with the Internet. Because of these factors, I decided to conduct this study. Perhaps the answer to these problems lies in the activities or habits of users. I set out to find the answer to these questions in this study. There are evidently many problems and errors associated with Internet use. People also frequently associate the Internet with a bunch of so-called computer geeks and teenagers illegally searching for pornography. I wanted to dispel this theory with my research. It was my hypothesis that the Internet, while having many worthwhile uses, also has many problems, and a lot of progress still to be made.
Procedures
My first step in researching Internet activities and behavior was to conduct observations of various people using computers and the Internet. I made these observations on three different dates. I watched fellow students in the high school library twice and observed my father using the Internet at home on one occasion. I watched to see what the subjects were doing, any problems or difficulties they had, or any comments they made.
My observations took place mainly in the library of Hempfield Area High School. During two of my study halls, I observed students in the library for other classes. During my first observation, most of the students around me were seniors. Most of the subjects of the second observation were sophomores. I looked to see what sorts of problems they had on the computers, what comments they made, their body language when dealing with teachers and friends, and what exactly they were looking at on the computers.
Baldwin, James. ?Notes of a Native Son.? 1955. James Baldwin: Collected Essays. Ed. Toni Morrison. New York: Library of America, 1998. 63-84.
James Baldwin lived during an extremely tumultuous time where hatred ruled the country. Race riots, beatings, and injustice flooded the cities that he, as well as most African Americans, was forced to live with every day. Many people, out of fright, suppressed their opposition to the blatant inequalities of the nation. However, some people refused to let themselves be put down solely because of their skin color and so they publicly announced their opposition. One such person was James Baldwin, who voiced his opinion through writing short stories about his experiences growing up as a black man. In order to convey to the reader the unbearable nature of this troubled era, he traces his feelings of hatred for his father and his hatred towards society, which transform as he evaluates his experiences.
...etimes these tensions exploded into riots, as in Detroit. Printed sources of the time recorded bits and pieces of varying data and left out other information. The public was finally beginning to become conscious of the racial inequalities in American cities. In addition, James Baldwin provided future generations a view of the injustices of the time.
Reilly, John M. " 'Sonny's Blues': James Baldwin's Image of Black Community." James Baldwin: A Critical Evaluation. Ed.Therman B. O'Daniel. Howard University Press. Washington, D.C. 1977. 163-169.
“He had been ill a long time-in the mind” (65) was the way Baldwin remembered his father. It is because of his father’s illness, that his paranoia is aimed at the world. The contradiction here is that his father is a preacher. Trust and all other forms of hope in human kind have been vanquished from him. He despises the world he lives in, the one that held his ancestors in fields working for rich white gentry. He looks to God for answers and preaches an angry version of lord’s sermons. Baldwin was pulled in the same direction as his father except he couldn’t truly hold the meanings of the words after long and lost aspirations of preaching. “It was said in the church, quite truthfully, that I was ‘cooling off’” (80) in his interest to the service of preaching and gained it in a service of writing.
Throughout the essay Baldwin talks about his fathers hatred or mistrust towards whites such as the story of the white schoolteacher who Baldwin’s stepdad has an immediate mistrust towards. This path is the path Baldwin, throughout his life has rebel against his father against, however as time moved one Baldwin began to feel this fight/hatred that his father experience not because of his father but because of his actual experiences. We can use the story of the restaurant for examples of this as well as an example for Baldwin and his father similarities. In the story you can tell this is a transition of ideas especially for Baldwin and the idea of his father. Before the death of his father Baldwin and his father had different views of the world, where his father saw only the past and nothing of the future, Baldwin saw people, saw change waiting to happen, the niceness of whites not the nastiness his father was keen to. Baldwin declares “I knew about Jim-crow but I had never experienced it” about the restaurant he had been going to for weeks, the racism that he was receiving was never received by him, until his “eyes were open” by the death of his father. This was an unknowingly act from the author that further assimilated him and his fathers
James Baldwin, an African-American writer, was born to a minister in 1924 and survived his childhood in New York City. The author is infamous for his pieces involving racial separatism with support from the blues. Readers can understand Harlem as a negative, unsafe environment from Baldwin’s writings and description of his hometown as a “dreadful place…a kind of concentration camp” (Hicks). Until the writer was at the age of twenty-four, he lived in a dehumanizing, racist world where at ten years old, he was brutally assaulted by police officers for the unchanging fact that he is African-American. In 1948, Baldwin escaped to France to continue his work without the distractions of the racial injustice
The works of James Baldwin are directly related to the issues of racism, religion and personal conflicts, and sexuality and masculinity during Baldwin's years.James Baldwin's works, both fiction and nonfiction were in some instance a direct reflection his life. Through close interpretation you can combine his work to give a "detailed" look into his actual life. However since most writings made by him are all considered true works of literature we can't consider them to be of autobiographical nature.
James Baldwin was born in Harlem in a time where his African American decent was enough to put more challenges in front of him than the average (white) American boy faced. His father was a part of the first generation of free black men. He was a bitter, overbearing, paranoid preacher who refused change and hated the white man. Despite of his father, his color, and his lack of education, James Baldwin grew up to be a respected author of essays, plays, and novels. While claiming that he was one of the best writers of the era could be argued either way, it is hard to argue the fact that he was indeed one of the most well-known authors of the time. One of his intriguing skills as a writer is his ability to intertwine narration and analysis in his essays. James Baldwin mixes narration and analysis in his essays so well that coherence is never broken, and the subconscious is so tempted to agree with and relate to what he says, that if you don’t pay close attention, one will find himself agreeing with Baldwin, when he wasn’t even aware Baldwin was making a point. Physical placement of analytical arguments and analytical transitions, frequency and size of analytical arguments, and the language used within the analytical arguments are the keys to Baldwin’s graceful persuasion. Throughout this essay, I will be using Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son” for examples. “Notes of a Native Son” is an essay that Baldwin wrote which focuses primarily on his life around the time his father died, which also happens to be the same time his youngest brother was born.
...as a reader I must understand that his opinions are supported by his true, raw emotions. These negative feelings shared by all of his ancestors were too strong to just pass by as meaningless emotions. Baldwin created an outlook simply from his honest views on racial issues of his time, and ours. Baldwin?s essay puts the white American to shame simply by stating what he perceived as truth. Baldwin isn?t searching for sympathy by discussing his emotions, nor is he looking for an apology. I feel that he is pointing out the errors in Americans? thinking and probably saying, ?Look at what you people have to live with, if and when you come back to the reality of ?our? world.?
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced” – James Baldwin. James Baldwin was one of the single most famous artists, or writers, during the Harlem Renaissance and in the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. Baldwin grew up in poverty and extremely harsh conditions with a family of nine children, his mother, and stepfather. He knew from the time he was just a young child that writing was his passion and that was what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Not only was he an excellent student in school with exceptional grades, he was observant of the world around him, and that led him to knowing more about the real world than most people his age (Contemporary). James Baldwin was one of the
Baldwin's mind seems to be saturated with anger towards his father; there is a cluster of gloomy and heartbreaking memories of his father in his mind. Baldwin confesses that "I could see him, sitting at the window, locked up in his terrors; hating and fearing every living soul including his children who had betrayed him" (223). Baldwin's father felt let down by his children, who wanted to be a part of that white world, which had once rejected him. Baldwin had no hope in his relationship with his father. He barely recalls the pleasurable time he spent with his father and points out, "I had forgotten, in the rage of my growing up, how proud my father had been of me when I was little" (234). The cloud of anger in Baldwin's mind scarcely lets him accept the fact that his father was not always the cold and distant person that he perceived him to be. It is as if Baldwin has for...
Throughout Baldwin’s essay he strategically weaves narrative, analytical, and argumentative selections together. The effect that Baldwin has on the reader when using this technique is extremely powerful. Baldwin combines both private and public affairs in this essay, which accentuates the analysis and argument sections throughout the work. Baldwin’s ability to shift between narrative and argument so smoothly goes hand in hand with the ideas and events that Baldwin discusses in his essay. He includes many powerful and symbolic binaries throughout the essay that help to develop the key themes and principles pertaining to his life. The most powerful and important binaries that appear in this essay are Life and Death.
...his father had acted the way he did, which caused him to be committed. He was facing the same experiences and the same side-effects his father once felt. However, faced with this dilemma between acceptance and equal power, Baldwin looks to the only man he can trust to help him, his father. He trusts his father because he knows that his father went through the same dilemma he is going through, he has seen the same affects in his father’s rage and hate. However, his father already passed away, and what help that could have been gathered from his father is gone; Baldwin can only piece together his memories of his father’s character and life and compare it to his own to see how the two are really alike.
James Baldwin is one of the premier essayists of his time. He draws on his experiences in a straightforward, unapologetic manner, which helps achieve his purpose in The Fire Next Time. His style elucidates his arguments for racial harmony and for the understanding of other religions.