'Celebrity' Big Brother? Really?.. No really? 'Celebrity'?

Big Brother is the British version of the Dutch Big Brother television format, which takes its name from the character in George Orwell's 1948 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. After a decade on air, Big Brother moved to Channel 5 in 2011, after the channel signed a 2-year contract. We have a year left...
Celebrity Big Brother 2012 is the ninth series of the British reality television series, that began on 5 January 2012. One question...How are Channel 5 getting away with calling the new series, 'Celebrity' Big Brother? The likes of Frankie Cocozza to Natasha Giggs? They even lost Lee Ryan in the line-up. Now that's bad. Apparently, Lee was all set to go but then he demanded to be paid more than £175,000. Yes, he was getting paid £175,000. How does that make sense to anyone? There's even the huge factor being that even Lee Ryan would have been one of five, who you could actually not struggle to say was famous for having a talent worthy of being famous.
11 years ago, Celebrity Big Brother began, the concept of actual celebrities going into the house in aid of Comic Relief. Celebrities being: Anthea Turner; an English television presenter, Chris Eubank; a boxer, Claire Sweeney; an actress and television presenter, Jack Dee; an English comedian, Keith Duffy an Irish singer, and Vanessa Feltz; a journalist and broadcaster. The term 'celebrity' can be used in this case, where these people actually have a claim to fame, for having a successful talent that got themselves appearing on television, the word 'successful' playing a major part in that sentence.
Big Brother is possibly the best way to illustrate just how our society is seemingly decaying. The fact being that if another Celebrity Big Brother is on it's way, it will consist of solely people who have appeared on the non-celebrity version of Big Brother, now being worthy of the 'Celebrity' status. Surely that should be the point where Channel 5 take a step back and have a look? Course they won't, everybody wants to know how Justine Sellman is doing and getting on, don't they?

N.B. Justine Sellman (Big Brother 4, 2003) is now married and working as an IT consultant.

Decay Of Our Society?..

Cultural values and society is indeed in decline. To illustrate this, if you took two newspapers, one being from 1959, and the other from 2012 present, I guarantee that the more recent newspaper will reveal a significantly lower cultural level in all respects, except the quality and quantity of photographs. There is a social and moral decay within our society. It's a fact that if you read The Sun newspaper then The Times newspaper, there's a difference in cultural interest significantly. Nobody realises it yet, but probably in the near future, the only news we will have will be; photographs of celebrities getting fat, and then showbiz gossip of who lost the most weight using their own fitness DVD's. If you seem to ask someone what's the biggest social issue of this week, it'll be Katy Perry and Russell Brand splitting up, or 'Jedward' on Alan Carr's Chatty Man, without a shadow of a doubt. This is the idea that celebrities take priority to somewhat general major issues of pollution or global warming, etc. Society has become so obsessed with this idea of a celebrity world to the extent that it has strayed away from the real issues at hand. People spend so many hours reading magazines, listening to radio shows, and even watching television shows revolved around celebrity gossip. What about the news? Or politics? What about the things affecting us personally or the things that will eventually affect us all? It's a question that must be asked in our celebrity culture: why do we care? What possesses us to keep up on our celebrity news? It comes as no surprise that our society is obsessed and mesmerised with fame. This is our decay of society on a culture level.

'Teenage Representation' sample

Media today is very useful to portray the way we live. Representation is 'the process whereby the media construct versions of peoples, places, and events in images or sound transmissions through media texts to an audience'.
All events are mediated by the texts that represent them. It takes forms and various techniques involved which are used to position the audience, so they take a particular view and feeling. ‘Every image is constructed and every opinion and feeling is manipulating’. We increasingly, are living in a ‘mediated’ society, in which that there is a process by the media that represents ideas, issues and events to us as the audience. There are techniques used for representation, particularly one being anchorage. This is ‘the fixing or limiting of a particular set of meanings to an image’. Anchorage gives a preferred reading, one most common example is where the anchorage text is underneath a photograph. The try to frame an image to get the audience thinking in a particular way, determining their feeling.
Media texts are usually known to rather than representing people as individuals, sections of the media use a 'shorthand' in the way in which they group people, known as stereotyping. This gives a negative and devaluing view on the people usually and most often, as it includes whole groups of people in society. Representation is usually to be found within the areas of class, age, gender, and ethnicity. It often shows how these 'identities' are represented as well as constructed.
Documentary film making is an opportunity to seek to document 'real' life. Documentaries such as 3 minute wonder on Channel 4 are commissioned as a series of shots by a director who wants to show primarily documentaries that generally highlight a current issue that is not public yet, or even to make a particular issue known.
It is well known that youth tend to suffer from a rather negative representation in the media. This is seen through looking at documentaries about teens and youth myself, and reading about it too. Teenagers are categorized mostly as from one scale to the other and never in-between, or 'normal' perhaps as would the public would say. Dick Hebdige is a British media theorist most commonly associated with the study of subculture. He wrote a book 'Hiding in the light: Youth surveillance as a display'. In it, he argues that young people fall into two distinct yet mutually dependent areas of representation. These are 'youth-as-trouble', and 'youth-as-fun'. He says that usually the category of 'youth-as-trouble' is presented in documentaries most often. For him, 'youth-as-fun' is presented later, mostly formed within advertisement, etc. Tabloids often sensationalise incidents of teen crime or issues present. Is it done just to keep things interesting for the audience? Of course it is. Often we are seeing someone else’s version of ‘reality’, as the ‘reality’ presented by the text is always going to have been constructed. People need to remember that!

01/01/2012

URBAN DICTIONARY: New Year's Resolutions - The things you promise yourself you will do over the year, but quit after the first 2 weeks.

“Bob's New Years Resolution was to lose 30 pounds...Yet Bob says a lot of things.”



...Bearing that in mind, here is my top ten NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS:
1. Manage my time and make time
2. Motivate myself to work harder on my studies of French and Journalism
3. To use my summer wisely
4. Get fit
5. Start going to gigs again
6. Take more photos/start working on more photography
7. Reduce, reuse, recycle
8. Volunteer
9. Sort my Grammar out
10. Explore Sheffield and its surrounding areas

"A New Year's resolution is a commitment that a person makes to one or more lasting personal goals, projects, or the reforming of a habit. This goal must be reached by the Next New Year. Keep in mind that this is a goal, not a wish and should be something that you as a person could strive for."

40 to 45% of American adults make one or more resolutions each year.
According to a survey carried out, 75% of people pass the first week, 2 weeks- 71%, one month- 64%, and 46% after 6 months.
While a lot of people who make new years resolutions do break them, making these resolutions, I believe, is very useful.

Giving up smoking and losing weight are the favourites, and each year, the number of fitness DVD sales and Nicotine patches sold increases. Another popular promise made is to deal with better money management and debt reduction.
A tip? Don't set the bar too high, if you want to achieve it, make it realistic.