Bloging

Writing a blog has been a very interesting and fun activity. I really think it has been a good idea from anyone who stated it. It is not only a class task, because my classmates and I have been working on them in our independent time also. You can notice that in the preoccupation with aesthetics on making each blog something personal, in which we put our effort in expressing ourselves, but also in making them interesting to the other classmates who will eventually read them.
I think by allowing us to express ourselves -and by that I don’t mean just show our deep interior selfish feelings but to write and think of the topics we liked at the time-, by having that chance I was able to build a connected, coherent theme based mainly in three topics: internet, its implication in life, and language, all of them carried out in most of the posts, stressing some aspects more in one post and the others in another.
A huge portion of the Internet and the programs to access here are available only in English (i.e. Wikipedia has 417.000 articles in Spanish, 537.000 in Japanese and 2.626.000 articles in English): it means that by learning English people expand their quantitative access to the web. In addition, a huge amount of important content written in native languages, have also an English version: by being able to surf the internet in English you are also (at least partially) able to access pages in other languages, and in different countries. The privilege of being able to use internet also makes people capable of helping those who don’t have that privilege: There are a lot of internet projects developed by user communities which are available for more and more people as volunteers translate the contents and the programs to local languages. Examples of that are Wikipedia, and the Free Software communities.
Though the use of blogs I have been able to learn internet skills which will help me to access more content which make my internet bigger, to make it accessible to other users who don’t speak English (like my mom), I learned in the practice the English writing skills –partially-, and I am also trying to get along with this blog posting thing, which is not that hard anymore.

Brazil

Terry Gilliam's Brazil plays a critique of XX century city life, to bureaucratization, mass production of false needs, the spread of ideology through mass media. The story is located “somewhere in the twentieth century”, inside a metropolis whose irrational rationality the characters -as real people nowadays- are unable to scape. Though events happening around Sam (the main character), an anonymous bureaucrat disenchanted with his world, expecting, wanting nothing from it, Gilliam tells the common story of our world in the late twentieth and early twenty first century: The instrumental relations held between persons; the lack of meaning in everything; the impossibility of escaping; the destruction of nature; the alienation of men though work, but also though the use of free time satisfying false needs... OK, at this point of my commentary the movie sounds quite depressing, well, it is not. The story is told though hyperbolic situations and spaces, though rich aesthetic, narrative and visual resources which illustrate this dystopian fantasy metropolis as a grotesque, but yet familiar, common space in contemporary life. The irrationality and the banalization of life is accused, caricatured explicitly but also implicitly by the proper use omissions, the ingeniously display of accidents and incidental situations, the exquisite aesthetic dimension, the cheats made on the viewer's expectations, and also humor, aspects which makes this movie a masterpiece.

I have the movie, so if anyone in the class is interested just ask... shouldn't have said that, Big Brother is reading us!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzRHTKa8iDE

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