#jwudenver

[sunflower-king-4]

Ladies and Gays.... Paella 🥘👨🏻‍🍳🦑🍤🦪🍋

[smile-your-ass-off]

Leon obviously knows how to party 🦁 🐒 🐘 🦒 #thechelseacollective #jwudenver #denvercakes #denvercakeartist #jwuinternship #rawr #jungle #animalkingdom #happybirthday #happyfirstbirthday (at Azucar Bakery) https://www.instagram.com/p/BmrW6cOBG-8/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1sj4ye3istjyo

[smile-your-ass-off]

I can’t believe my internship is almost over! I’ve had the best time and really learned a lot! 🌵 🌺 🌵 #denvercakeartist #denvercakes #azucarbakery #cactus #buttercream #congratsnaniandjacob #jwuinternship #jwudenver (at Azucar Bakery)

[sophiakim-blog1]

Media Reflection 2

This class was a big eye-opener for the way I will be looking at things in the media. This class makes me think deeper into the media that is put out for us to see. Especially now a days with the current events of police brutality and all the political events. Media has so much power over us and that power has been there from the beginning. Media industries are able to control the entire country by choosing specifically what we see and watch. That is why some believe that certain situations get out of control due to the way the industry displays it for us. This ties in a lot with the political campaigns and the eventual winnings of Donald Trump. People believe that the big corporate organizations control us through the media. That if anything Donald Trump’s winning probably had to do with the way publicity put a spotlight on him. Those big corporate companies do what they want and we just kind of allow them to and simply watch from the side line.

  I cannot explain it clearly but the easiest way I can explain it is by saying this could all be some sort of conspiracy.

 However, who really knows what the industry is doing exactly but we can say that they definitely play a huge role in our lives. I mean looking at the way news reports and magazines publish things. They only things they talk about are scandals, wars, fights, police brutality, racial events and so much more. A lot of times the things that get publicized are negative and end up causing a lot of outrage. Some could view that as a negative thing yet some might say that focusing on the dumb or positive stuff simply covers up the things that matters. All this revolves around different media and involves itself in our daily lives. In the back of my mind I also think a little deeper about who owns what in the industry and how that can influence the channel.  It is odd that when you think about it so many companies run under one organization. It is also intriguing to think about the way they could be using their platforms to control us. I am also able to say that when I hear media I do not just think of TV shows and movies; I realize now there is so much more to it. There is an entire media platform that some might have never considered as part of the media. There is also more to media than just the content but the way things are presented. The media either over sexualizes or stereotypes, whether it is for commercials, movies or shows. Now with the knowledge from this class I can analyze things differently and perhaps approach things in a new light. I hope to be able to carry this knowledge on as I continue in life and as the media progresses to grow.

 Thank you once again for everything, I really loved your class!!!

p.s. I do apologize for the large amount of GIFs, I kind of got exited and might have gotten carried away. Yet I just don't have the power to take any of them off, sorry!!

[sophiakim-blog1]

Evolving the Disney Princesses

Disney has created many movie favorites for so many generations. One of their biggest selling points besides the amusement parks and the obvious character Mickey Mouse is of course the Disney princesses. Disney Princess is a media franchise that is owned by The Walt Disney Company, originally created in the late 1990s and launched in 2000. Now from the very first princess, Snow White, to the more recent princess Moana Disney has expand quite a lot over the years.  

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Now the good thing about that is that over these many years Disney has been starting to grow and develop more and more Disney princesses that stand for something more. The original Disney princesses tend to do more on the delicate side, who are rescued by the prince and who will marry at the first meeting. Now a day the princesses are becoming more and more independent. Of course let’s not forget the Mulan, 1998, is still the original princess to step out of a dress and into a man’s uniform to save her father. After this it took a couple more years for Disney to step out of their “comfort zone” to create more girl empowering movies. There was Brave’s Merida and Frozen’s Elsa and Anna and the most recent one Moana. Not only has Disney started to step out of their typical Disney look but now they have the girls doing something important. That is the problem with the media, that is why I chose to talk about this, they have the men saving the world and their female companion is just a side kick. In very rare occasions is a female lead actually saving the world or doing something super incredible. Usually the media is stating that men have to be tough, macho men and will always save the day. Than saying that women are the damsel in distress who need to be rescued and cannot do anything on their own. So to see Disney evolving from their typical princess era is a really nice breath of fresh air. This is important for the millions of girls out there who adore and look up at the princesses. Each Disney princess movie sort of sets out a certain standard for little girls. They start to think and act like the princess and believe that everything that happened to the princess will happen to them.

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Meaning when they see the princess waiting on a prince to save her, they will expect nothing more from themselves. They will grow up wanting to depend on someone and thinking “a girl should not be doing much more than waiting on a man.” However, with Mulan, Brave, Frozen and hopefully more empowering movies to come; little girls will see that they can fight and be just as good if not better than a boy, setting herself set out to do better things. Now looking at two specific examples of good influential movies they are Pocahontas and Mulan. Sure critics will say there are flaws with these movies but even with their flaws Disney had a good intention and made a step in the right direction. Pocahontas came out first as a heroine who is an adventurous young woman who stands up for her beliefs. She is also one of the very few female protagonists whose story does not end in matrimony (Dundes.) Than Disney took a bigger step with Mulan, she was completely breaking down the typical girl stereotype. Not only did she honor her father and her family, she also was able to save all of China with the help of men as her side kicks, not the other way around. This movie also does a terrific job on touching base with really important topics such as honor, gender roles, family pride, obedience and family. Now the big concept of gender roles comes from Mulan obviously dressing as a man, another smaller time is when at the end Yao, Ling and Chien-Po dress as women to save the emperor. Cross dressing can be a touchy subject but Disney conquered it and was able to turn things around. Usually women have to act like men to be able to fight or do something heroic. Yet here are three soldier’s dressed as pretty girls to be able to conquer the guards. This movie allows for that counterpart where boys can maybe see that there is nothing wrong with cross dressing and that girls can be just as strong.

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As this current generation keeps progressing in order for Disney to stay successful they will need to keep developing the company. They will need to keep making more stubborn and strong hearted girls who save the guy, the country or even just the day. Even with Disney’s Moana, they are already showing that they recognize the various cultures, skin colors and body types that are out there. That will allow for Disney to keep successfully growing for the years to come as this generation keeps realizing there is something wrong with the gender portrayal in the media industry.

References Dundes, L. (2001). Disney's modern heroine Pocahontas: revealing age-old gender stereotypes and role discontinuity under a facade of liberation. Social Science Journal, 38(3), 353.

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(it is not letting me add photos into my text properly so I put the numbers where the photos would be and added the numbers above the photo, sorry!! The ones at the end were more for entertainment that I wished to put throughout the text.)

(Also my apologies but I did end up changing my topic a little bit, obviously from taking about just Mulan to gender roles in Disney movies as a whole)

[sophiakim-blog1]

Critical Thinking #1: broad cast yourself...but be cautious!

Google is an American multinational technology company specializing in internet-related services and products. Some of those include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing and software. A lot of Google’s profits come from an online advertising service, AdWords, that place advertising near the list of search results. Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, it began as a research project. Search engines use to rank results by counting the times the search terms appeared on the page, from there both Page and Brin analyzed a better relationship between websites. They called the new technology PageRank, which determined a websites relevance by the number of pages and the importance of those pages that linked back to the original site. At first they called the search engine BackRub, since the system checked the backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. Eventually they renamed it to Google, originating from a misspelling of the word googol. From there on   Together they own about 14% of its shares and control 56 percent of the stockholder voting power through super voting stock. A little bit more about the history of Google, it was incorporated as a private held company on September 4th, 1998. A public offering took place on August 19th, 2004 and they moved to their new headquarters in Mountain View, California, nicknamed the Googleplex. In August 2015, Google announced plans to reorganize its interest as a holding company called Alphabet Inc. Later on in October 2nd, 2015 google became Alphabet’s leading subsidiary, and a parent for Googles internet interests.

Since then Google has grown progressively by creating lots of various outlets beyond Googles core search engine. They have even partnered up with the development of Android mobile operating system. Another big investment Google made was when they acquired Keyhole Inc. which developed Earth Viewer, which gave three-dimensional view of the Earth. Later on it renamed the service to Google Earth in 2005. Not only that but they have also outlet to various partnerships biggest one was when they acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock on October 2006 and finalized on November 13th, 2006. From there on Google has not stopped investing in what they believe what will benefit them the most, companies like AOL, MySpace, investing into renewable energy, Android and so many more. One of the biggest and more successful investments that we will talk about is YouTube.

  Google obviously likes to work in a horizontal integration, allowing them to advertise through YouTube. YouTube is on its own platform but everything does go through Google, even if the customers do not see that happening. This was a brilliant investment on Googles part because YouTube is a fast expanding company that not only allows you to share videos but also allows you to watch movies, shows, listen to music videos and so much more. YouTube helps Google fill in many gaps with its versatile and easy to use network and allows them strengthen Google’s advertisement edge. Buying YouTube gives Google a stronger competitive advantage over online advertising. Obviously, with Google and YouTube partnership, they are strong media force; Google on its own is already one of the strongest search engines out there, compared to Bing. However, in order to stay a head of the game owning YouTube puts Google at the top. Like mentioned before YouTube is expanding every day and for Google to in charge of that, it will really benefit them in the end.

On the question of why Google bought YouTube, I kept finding answers on why YouTube even agreed. It would make sense for Google to try to own YouTube since it is such a big and successful company. Nevertheless, YouTube did not have to agree and they themselves have even mentioned that they wanted to stay as an independent company. With Google, they are still able to do that, keep their original identity and even stay at their headquarters. The co-founder himself said he does not know of a better company to work with. Googles chief executive believes the two companies are natural partners; YouTube team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. YouTube is looking at it as, "By joining forces with Google, we can benefit from its global reach and technology leadership to deliver a more comprehensive entertainment experience for our users and to create new opportunities for our partners." From there on Google has worked a lot with YouTube to help it expand its business further than just sharing videos online. Google shaped up the company to be the second biggest search engine in the world, besides Google itself. Google and YouTube have also managed to create bigger communities for themselves. One is a small online community, where if you have a Google email (Gmail) than you will be able to comment in the comment section of videos on YouTube. Not only will the creators of those videos see your feedback but other subscribers and fans can see it too and perhaps like your comment or maybe just even respond to you. This creates a fandom for those YouTube creators, which allows them to expand their channel even more.

This not only benefits the YouTubers to grow but as well as YouTube in general. The other community that has expanded more and more over the years is the physical aspect of that community known as VidCon.  VidCon is multi-genre online video conference, held annually in Southern California since 2010. This is the largest of its kind in the world, gathering thousands of online video viewers, creators and industry representatives worldwide. This event alone shows how well YouTube has been able to do only a few years after Google stepped in. Even if in the beginning, everyone thought that Google was making a mistake by investing into YouTube everyone thought it would die down. Google believed the popular-video sharing site would provide an increasingly lucrative hub as people migrate from television to the internet. These growing communities allow for Google, YouTube to keep growing, and expanding for the years to come. From the looks of it, Google will be able to keep being the number one search engine for a while with YouTube alongside of it. The only thing they need to focus on in order to really make themselves a stronger corporation is providing better privacy for their users. They have been known for selling peoples information to companies, Google really needs to think ahead and realize that is not smart on their part. Eventually in the years to come another search engine with a better moral compass will have the opportunity to steal all of Googles consumers.

(I don't know why two of my photos look kind of blurry but even when I tried to reload it, it kept coming out of focus. Hopefully it was okay for me to add in that GIF at the end :)  

[sophiakim-blog1]

a little about me

1. Where do you get the majority of your news? Why do you choose the source and medium you do? How do you use it and how often? Do you share this news with others? If so, with whom and how? If not, why not?  A majority of my news would come from Facebook, whether it’s my friends posting something or a source that I am following. Sometimes I do check the news app on my phone but besides that most of my news updates come from Facebook posts. Usually the websites that tend to come up are Buzzfeed, who do a really nice break down of big situation that might be occurring on the news. There is also HuffingtonPost, The New York Times, The Washington Post and ABC News. I am not really able to comment on how often I use because I just look at it when something of my interest shows up. Usually I do not share this news with other because by the time I take a look at it most of the people I am friends with already know about it. I am not the type of person to really post much on Facebook anyway, the main reason I keep the account is to stay up to date with all the news.

2. What is your favorite source of media entertainment (television show, radio program, podcast, films (theater? streaming online? Netflix?), etc.)? Why do you choose this program/source? How do you use it and how often? Do you use it alone or with others? If so, with whom and how? If not, why not?  My number one source of media entertainment is definitely YouTube, I am constantly watching videos of some sort. Usually I really enjoy watching vlogs from a few couples, I find it really interesting and cute to see how differently everyone lives there life. Especially when they have different views, backgrounds and experiences that they share with the world. For me personally it expands my horizon to see more things differently. I also enjoy all the typical stuff that includes make up videos, global entertainment videos and music. Besides that I love watching Netflix, it brings a lot of laughter and fun into my life. It brings a certain type of joy that you cannot receive in real life because those situations do not tend to happen to us.  I love Friends, Modern Family, George Lopez and a few others I cannot remember. Some of my other favorite shows are Criminal Minds, NCIS, Law & Order SVU, House, Monk, Psych, Leverage and Stranger Things. I tend to love criminal related shows, I find it intriguing how the shows depict the way criminals think and the reasons they do certain things.

A lot of these shows are older but I do love rewatching them and I do tend to watch them alone because my friends are either not interested or have already seen it. However I do enjoy watching it by myself, I find certain things funnier than other people do.

3. Tell me about the most significant media event you have experienced (via the media, not in person). Where did you see/hear/otherwise experience it? What was the experience like? Were you alone or with others? Why is it the significant to you? What is its lasting impression on you?  A recent event that affect me was the Stanford rapist, Brock Turner. Now I have never been in that situation myself, however seeing this happen and the way things are handled it is terrifying. I think the reason it affected me is because obviously I myself am in college and I feel like after seeing this happen at Stanford, a highly prestige’s school, I feel like it could happen to anyone. Now obviously rape has always happened, in school across the globe, I remember there was even a rape on one of the other Johnson & Wales campuses a few years ago. It’s just during that time I thought “rape probably wouldn’t happen at such a small school like Johnson & Wales, right?” Yet seeing how things have been handled with this case petrifies me more about the future to come for all rapists and their victims. I feel like all future victims will be terrified to come out and tell anyone they have been raped, not for the fact of what people will say to them but with the matter of what will happen to her rapist. Also rapists might start thinking they will get away with it a lot easier since all they have to be is possibly be Caucasian, attending a great school and play a sport of some sort really well. I mean it terrifying to know that a “respectable” judge said something along the lines of “he is such a good swimmer, I would hate to tarnish that all because of a drunk girl.” The father even said “he shouldn’t go to jail for the rest of his life all because of just 20 minutes”, sadly even with the news keep saying “Stanford Swimmer” rather just a rapist. Why does it matter is he’s a swimmer? He is just a rapist, it is sad to know that even the news outlets are protecting him. The original judge appointed to case was even know to have given a much harder punishment to another boy who raped a girl rather than just getting a slap on the wrist. Again even though I have not had any experience, I feel terrified with what our future holds after this event.

http://www.newsweek.com/race-class-feminism-and-brock-turner-496975

https://www.buzzfeed.com/kassycho/a-college-student-created-a-powerful-photo-series?utm_term=.te2Nzevrz#.gjBdY93BY

^one of the best photo series out there right now

[alexiarxmirez]

Kimmy, Jessica, and the women from Grey’s Anatomy

Television has consistently changed throughout the years and on the daily basis, especially today in 2016. This trimester in my Television Studies course, we discussed and explored in how television changed throughout the years has progressed. For homework, were assigned to watch a few modern television series that were only available on Netflix. Those shows were The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Jessica Jones. Both shows demonstrated different forms of trauma in two women’s lives who’s lifestyles were totally opposite. 

I’m not going to lie, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt was such a hard show for me to actually get into. At first I thought, “What the hell is my professor making me watch?”. After getting through a few episodes I started to get really interested and I was stuck on this show. It may seem really stupid at first but it is worth the watch. Throughout the first few episodes, it is obvious that Kimmy is having a hard time trying to fit in and get the grasp of living and acting like an adult in New York City. “For such a deliberately cartoonish show, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has a remarkable grasp on its central character’s buried traumas and the ever-widening gulf between New York City’s moneyed class and the victims of their wave of gentrification.” (Sims, 2016). Though Kimmy has been through a lot because of her past of being trapped in the bunker, she is a very independent woman and is determined to get back the life she lost and to continue to grow as a woman. “The show doesn’t address sexual violence head on; it’s possible to watch without dwelling on the details. But Kimmy’s ugly history comes through, in inference and in sly, unsettling jokes about trauma, jagged bits that puncture what is a colorful fish-out-of-water comedy.” (Nussbaum 2015) Again, Kimmy has been through a lot and some of the things that she goes through on her own in New York City remind her of what her life was like before she was rescued from the bunker. Some of the things that she goes through make her remember what it was like being in the bunker and it scares her. Many of those moments that make her remember, you can say they are her PTSD moments. 

Jessica Jones, another great show that is on Netflix and one of the shows I had to watch for my Television Studies class. When I first saw this show, I saw that is was made by Marvel, so I immediately thought about superheroes. Superheroes with capes and tights. But with this show, that is not the case, it is the complete opposite. To me, Jessica Jones is a very dark show that is not afraid to actually show what happened. It was hard for me to continue watching this whole series, I even had nightmares because the show is so dark. But don’t get me wrong, Jessica Jones is a really great show and it shows another way in how women can be independent and that they do not need a man to take care of them or do anything else for them. One of the things that I noticed about this show and that somewhat bothered me and I guess my classmates too was that Jessica Jones always wore the same damn outfit in every single episode. Even though she wore the same thing, she sure did kick some ass and showed that women are also strong as men. Just by watching the credits of the show for the intro, you can automatically notice that this show also shows some sort of trauma that Jessica went through before she got to where she is today. 

Just like Kimmy, Jessica also seems to suffer from several PTSD moments while she’s going on with her day. After being captive by Killgrave and being able to escape, she tends to hear his voice in her head as she is either walking through New York City or helping on one of her cases. “something a little bit different, something more edgy and not just a rehash of the gritty opener, and Jessica Jones fit the bill in the way perhaps no other comic book hero could.” (Goss, 2015). Jessica Jones is such a unique hero. But just like all the others, she also has a life to live and a job that helps pay for the bills. Even though Jessica Jones has been through a lot, it does not stop her from wanting to help others and but the bad people where they belong. This show shows another way in how women can be strong and independent on their own. 

So how does this all tie down or compare to Grey’s Anatomy? “ABC's Grey's Anatomy has always put its spotlight on strong and driven women...” (Goldberg, 2015) Just like Kimmy and Jessica, the women from Grey’s Anatomy also have their own story and somewhat suffer from their memories of what they’ve been through. “The women of Grey's never shy away from challenging situations - in fact it's what fuels their passion. They aren't just good at what they do, but they are fiercely ambitious and never let anything or anyone jeopardize their climb to the top.” (Goldberg, 2015) These shows help show that women can also go through a lot yet they still have their life together and also be able to help others. It amazes me that shows today are slowly showing how strong a woman can be and be able to take the lead and lead others. As days go by, women are proving the statistics of being fragile and weak, are wrong and that they too can be as strong as a man.