Monday, November 16, 2009
iMedia: Jaywalking
"Americans are NOT stupid" (below)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJuNgBkloFE
**Disclaimer: No copyright infringement intended, I don't own any of this material.
As hilarious as this all is, it shows how sad reality is. I'm not going to lie and say it's not funny at all, because I can't deny that I find it quite entertaining. However, this illustrates a serious problem in our society. Do people really not know these basic facts? I'm sure some are just trying to be funny, but really, most of these people don't know this information? How does this reflect on our society? As much as I love this, it's really pathetic to watch. I know these people must have learned this sometime in their youth, because it's mostly required in curriculum. It reflects on the education system because people just learn to pass tests and then they forget the facts. I'm guilty of this too, but seeing this makes me realize more and more that we should care about learning so we don't end up being ridiculously unintelligent when we are older. The even sadder part here is that not only do the people not know about history or current events, they don't even know about pop culture. We're notorious for reading tabloids and watching t.v., but apparently nobody learned even from that. The guy wearing the shirt didn't even know what it said. I know that these people may be the exception to the rule, but do we want to end up like that? I certainly don't. We should take this and learn that education and information is valuable and if we don't want to be ridiculed, we should care about it more.
In the "Americans are NOT stupid" video, it comes to show how we are viewed in the world. And to think these people can vote for role models and leaders? What will happen to us when uneducated people take part in current events and politics? Even a slight amount of uneducated individuals bring down the community. It makes our culture look so bad, and causes people throughout the world to think we aren't capable of anything. But if this is what they see about our culture, can we blame them? That's not for me to judge, but what we can and should do to change this is by educating ourselves. People should rather make a conscious effort to better themselves, because not only will they learn something they will carry forward in their lives, but they will feel better and have better esteem knowing that they are smart and are capable. From this media connection, we should just think twice before disregarding events and history, and other knowledge, because who wants to end up being mocked like this?
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I thought that this was a really interesting clip and the insight into it was very modern. I don't usually watch the show, and when I saw this clip I was horrified. The mere fact that people don't know blatantly obvious information that anyone who's attended school should know. I think that Nirali's comment about how people who watch TV should even know some of this information, and I think that it shows how people have stopped caring to retain important cultural information and ultimately that can become very damaging to our society.
ReplyDeleteNirali,
ReplyDeleteAlot of the questions asked are very culturally important only to America; you wouldn't expect an immigrant to know who the founding fathers were, the saying 'rivalry is everywhere', etc. Each culture/nation has its own 'important' facts. Knowledge of these facts doesn't pose a direct link to intelligence, or wisdom, as knowing some arbitrary facts doesn't necessarily imply that. However, I agree with you that not knowing these things exemplifies ineffectiveness of the American public school system. Part of the problem is people don't want to make an effort just to be smarter. Stuff to buy you saw in a commercial and watching stupid TV shows is much less work intensive than actually doing work. If our society emphasized the importance of hard-work and intelligence, instead of telling us to buy the latest iPod and designer shoes, we might be in a better off intellectually.
This was an interesting post, because I have seen "Jaywalking" on Leno's show and found it pretty entertaining, but I never really thought about the fact that people don't know such simple facts. It reminds me of the movie "Super Size Me," where kids are asked if they know who certain people are (like Jesus or Presidents) and they only know which one Ronald McDonald is.
ReplyDeleteWhile all of this is pretty funny, it shows that there is a big lack of basic knowledge in our world these days. This is all stuff that people should know, and the fact that they don't is just a little bit scary. I guess there isn't a way to force people to know this, but maybe a little more emphasis on details like this would help.