Melissa King of Better Online through Content Moderation, makes the point content controls exist to better the lives of those that use the media, not changing everything that could happen, but it allows for people to have privacy, less anxiety especially for those with PTSD, and to choose what they want to look at or not. The only bad thing here as she states in her argument is what the people that use content control have to deal with, with all the criticism of the opposition referring to them as “Weak” and “Too sensitive” (Melissa), pressuring them to basically go to extreme lengths they are not used to and basically bully these people; which is why having content controls allows for a barrier to exist from this type of violence for these people even more so for those with PTSD to have less anxiety from this. Even though it does not completely erase the problem, content controls should be used. (1)

Those against content control are the ones that think the ones “too sensitive” completely exaggerate the abuse they receive; this is completely similar to Exposure Therapy, which is basically when a person is exposed to whatever creates the stress each time to trigger less and less anxiety; this being completely erroneous or out of hand for a person especially with PTSD since it could worsen their condition of anxiety instead of making it better. She also talks about the myth where young people today are not as sensitive to many issues, so they are able to deal with this content and be more open to it, but really are not. This problem of bullying online creates PTSD, and a repeated bullying makes it worse. (2-3)

Melissa King talked about blocklists how they are being more used especially against hater groups, but many users are completely against the blocklists using legal action. Like Randi Harper made clear that having a blocklist can make a person become flagged for using one and can limit ones accesses to different Gamergate on Twitter. For a person to use a blocklist they have to find one used for their needs. People against blocklists are not the harassers but they see defense by targets of the bullying as the bullying itself, so in this case blocklists are not considered good due to the forcing of one’s internet experience to another’s. (3)

King states these points of views do not do a good job at showing how horrible the bullying is online. She talks about how bad it is to the point where in Gamergate they take pictures and post info of the users threatening them to not say a word; so it is hard to see which one is the abuser and which one is the abused. (4) The abuse is not something uncommon, and it happens a lot to women especially in areas where there are mostly men; a lot more of this abuse happens more frequently in tech areas and video game culture, with harassment being very frequent, PTSD can occur. With the amount of proof that exists of this abuse, women do not have to keep talking about it and people should not even think to think why to have block and content controls. King says the best option available is for individuals to control the way the internet works for them. (5)

In almost the end, Melissa talks about how those people that are against blocklists, those that take legal action against those that choose to have content control, or any judgment against those people that decide to have that privacy, are disrespectful to the personal choices those other people make. She said everyone should make their own choices, but the disrespectful people will never change in pressuring others in these horrible situations. (5)

Melissa King concluded saying every person is different and thinks differently so not everyone will feel the same way about everything. Every individual should take into account what they need for themselves. Not every person can deal with certain situations. She feels no one can force anything on someone else, that this is a type of violence that exists from the anti-content control people making misinformed opinions that do not help others with their mental state but allow for more online abuse. (5)

King, Melissa. “Better Online Living Through Content Moderation.” Model View Culture. 14 October 2015. Web. 5 March 2016.

As these two authors Phia Bennin and Brendan McMullan were working on a Colors show, they decided to experience what is called Color Walking. The person that helped his students with color walking was William Burroughs. The color walking is really only when you leave your house or immediately when you go out, you just pick a color that attracts your eyes and watch how all the colors jump out to you as you see different things as you go. As Bennin and McMullan said it could be the color red seen on different objects, so could the color yellow for example being the Sun, a lemon, yellow in a rainbow, yellow buses, bananas, and more. (1)

Bennin and McMullan went crazy on this Color Walk they did. They talked about how they would see “a woman’s lavender hand bag might draw us to the right; a yellow cab could pull us down a side street; a green pistachio ice cream cone could shove us into the park.” (Bennin & McMullan) They started their journey of Color Walking at WNYC, Manhattan on a Sunday afternoon. They started with blues, which made itself to pink, then grabbing their attention to violets. By the time they were ending the Color Walk, as it was becoming the end of the day, they saw how the entire space of earth is flooded with all colors. They ended with seeing “rusty orange of a rooftop water tower in the sun, a bright blue mohawk, and the humble yellowy greens of a new leaf all jumped into our eyes.” (Bennin & McMullan) (1)

Bennin and McMullan said if any person would like to experiment with this type of phenomenon that they encountered, then they should take the advice they say of having at least one hour where you have nothing to do, where you do not have anything on your schedule or anything that interrupts the time you have for this, only to have that hour to just use your eyes; to choose a color or one that makes your heart pop out of excitement if you do not know which color to choose; and finally if you get lost at a certain point in this process, then to choose a different color, and if you really get lost then that is the way to go, that is what is supposed to happen in Color Walking. (2)

Color Walking in this summary in a definition would be: to use a time of the day where one is not busy to find time to go insane with colors on all objects including: people, clothes, houses, cars, toys, sidewalks, the sky, just about anything you can see as you leave your house or wherever you may be. It can be at any location, any place, really any time of the day to Color Walk, but at night it could be harder because of the darkness. Color Walking is something anyone can do.

Bennin, Phia and McMullan Brendan. “Color Walking.” RadioLab. WNYC Radio, 29 June 2012. Web. 4 March 2016.

In Recognizing Campus Landscapes as Learning Spaces, Kathleen G. Scholl and Gowri Betrabet Gulwadi talks about the history in how the university campuses have created their campuses away from the distraction of the outside world but where the open space can be used by the public and the way the open space, creates its own recreational facilities, its own identity, and more to make it a more educational environment for the student. (53)

The next part of the article shows how Kathleen and Gowri uses different quotes and in her own words in basic terms that the way a physical landscape is designed, can affect the way a person behaves and the outside world or nature can help a person who gets tired or bored easily and ends up in taking a richer and deeper learning experience then the classroom instruction which is the stagnant kind of experience. Even in the article of where Kathleen and Gowri and  talks about the ART which is Attention Restoration Theory, which “centers on the internal and external influences affecting one’s cognitive ability and suggests that exposure to and interaction with nature has specific recovery effects on the human attentional system.”(54) The nature explained in this article is living and nonliving nature from the wilderness to the beautiful flowers to the running water to the roaming animals, the weather, air, and more. The landscape is defined as a way for people to interact with the environment, basically as an example the kind of relationship a student has with nature and the built environment and how that affects their way of learning and cognitive thinking, the way they solve problems, their reactions, their memory and more.This way of working with the environment allows for direct and indirect attention and restoration. Direct attention which involves with using our memory, help us in our daily activities, making us use our brains to focus and prevent from other things to distract us from what we are doing. This makes it important for the students to have this opportunity to be able to see multiple things and ideas presented and being able to achieve the goals they have in college rather than not using different skills and not learning. The part where it talks about the Involuntary attention is where the person or student is able to take a break from all that brain frying of being in the classroom all the time feeling tired and completely distracted thinking about other things rather than learning, which could help the student with their overall experience in their campus and their overall success in their education. It is like Kathleen and Gowri said, “A wide range of natural settings in and around a college campus can play a role in student learning and engagement.”(55) Kathleen and Gowri also said that “Future research can test the premise substantiated by past literature that the natural landscape of a college can be an asset by enabling attention-restorative benefits and positively influencing learning and academic performance.”(55) It says in the article we have three types of interactions with nature being incidental, indirect and intentional with the environment. From these three types of interactions, studies showed that when there is no nature or natural component there, we do not have enough rest in our most important time of rest and it also showed how urban life does not give us enough rest or enough of what we need to to use our “attentional capacities effectively.”(55) Both Scholl and Gulwadi showed a chart of examples of Student-nature interactions in campus landscapes (56). It shows in the next page how this experiment or creation of nature in most open spaces of universities help students with using their multiple senses and help the students have more attention restoration allowing them to have a dynamic learning environment. Not to always use this in everything or always, but can help mostly when the students study and then take breaks going to this type of environment to help restore that attention, and help increase do even better in their thinking and learning. Both of the authors concluded saying, “In this paper, we focused on the cognitive benefit that is holistically designed campus can provide as a resource for learning, that is the enhancement of “direct attention.” Thereby, we also addressed the importance of providing multi-dimensional access to student-nature campus to include our conceptualization of a holistic landscape, and expanded the notion of student learning to include our vision of dynamic and holistic learning so that much-needed breaks/pauses in learning can occur in all kinds of indoor and outdoor enclosures.”(57-58)

Scholl, Kathleen, & Gowri Betrabet Gulwadi. “Recognizing Campus Landscapes as Learning Spaces.” Journal of Learning Spaces [Online], 4.1 (2015): n. pag. Web. 13 Feb. 2016

In this Article everything stood out to me, but specifically the part in the article where Irina Neressova in the section of the Domestic Architecture says, “The homeless are faced with a reality others avoid recognizing by divorcing themselves from urban space and by providing themselves with a false impression of control by obtaining material signs of wealth and security. Having to face this reality of vulnerability, the homeless demonstrate, for the rest of the people, the inventive nature of endurance.”

It is true as the people in general see what circumstances anyone can end up in, being if there is no money and protection then you will end up on the streets with a higher risk of dying because of the climatic weather, famine, thirst, lack of human contact, being in your own manure, and in more unfortunate situations. Money is not everything, but it is necessary to be able to be okay in this short life in having your own home, in having an education, and in being able to become a professional, but it is not everything. People that have that “false reality of control(…)” in Money, power, and security are never going to be secure, and it is definetly not the reason why we were created to be on this earth, because we can die any day so the security is really non-existent and when we die the money and power will not go with us, by that time you will be judged in your good and bad deeds by our Merciful and Just God.

The homeless show the most fortunate how it can happen to us any day. There is just no real security because any person, any CEO could become unemployed and end up on the street because they could not pay for their house, anyone could have family problems where the children grown up do not care for their older senior parents so they are on the street. There are others that have had harder lives then most where they were abused and ended up in drugs, no one really knows every person’s situation, but those homeless people beg for the outside world to help them. They might demonstrate their “endurance(….)” to us that they have not given up because they actually want to do something with their lives and are trying to survive in these unfortunate states of being so they do not die, and very few that really do not care what happens, BUT in general I know for a fact that these valuable people on the streets are imploring and needing help of every person that is able to buy a sandwich or quickly make one and have groups of people feeding them, giving them advice, and have different centers or rehabilitation buildings made for these people so they can become successful individuals and bring back that self-dignity that was lost as a person, as a child of God, as a human being.

I have been able to observe and personally experience giving the food to these homeless people on the streets in a Religious Community Group, and while it is great to see how thankful they are, it is very heartbreaking seeing how they live and how sad many of them feel when we go, and their tears running down their cheeks. This experience has shown me that many of us are very ungrateful because we always complain about small things or think we have it bad, but no, there are many people that need our help. These homeless people really are in spiritual, emotional, physical, and in psychological need. They want and need our help because they alone are not able to pick their selves up. No human being wants to be on the street.

In Conclusion, I hope people would stop thinking of their own problems all the time, and actually see how many people and organizations need more of our help: homeless people, protection of old people, protection of the babies in the womb, more support for those single mothers, support for those that are abused, guidance in spiritually, more protection for wildlife, etc. All of these things I have listed and the etc. part, need of us.

(Citation)

Nersessova, Irina. “Tapestry of Space: Domestic Architecture and Underground Communities in Margaret’s Morton’s Photography of a Forgotten New York.” DisClosure: A Journal of Social Theory: Vol. 23, Article 3. UK Knowledge, 2014. Web. 23 Jan. 2016. <http://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1025&context=disclosure>.

In the article of Architectural Exclusion by Sarah Schindler, the built environment is shown as an unseen barrier to the people of all time being in our history, present, and possible future. The built environment has also been ignored by those legal scholars, constructors and those responsible in the design layout of the cities and everything around it because they do not see the architecture as a way of regulation; controlling the way people act and where they go and possibly affecting how they travel as well. The walls, highways, one-way streets, and more obstacles have originally been inserted in the communities going back into our history, to separate or in other words segregate the Black including Latinos away from the Whites, since the white people were always “above” any of these minorities, well that being the mentality of before, the whites had to be separate from the rest. The whites always thought that they had to be protected from the “violence” and poverty of the minorities, they just did not accept them. They were extremely racist in many states and found that the only way to not see them or be near them, was through shutting down a part of a street or creating signs, and highways in a certain way that did not allow even the buses to travel those parts that white people were living in. Ridiculously, there was even “racially restrictive covenants, racial zoning, and exclusionary zoning…” said Sarah Schindler on her Article (In part III). It was to a point where those white city planners or designers of the way things would be gridded out, would literally cut through black neighborhoods where thousands lived and put the highway there so they forcibly moved them from there homes, making many homeless and making them go into public housing where they maybe could stay.(Sarah Schindler) It was absurd. There was an extreme amount of racism that existed before and still now.

Exclusion in the architecture of the environment was the main idea Sarah Schindler pointed out. Before it was racism and “violence” related that the people specifically whites who wanted those walls and other barriers built, and now it could still have that impact today. There are people that live in neighborhoods where they like having security so unknown characters do not trespass easily without permission of those living in those neighborhoods (Sarah Schindler), so those communities have the cage-like somewhat elegant type fences surrounding all of their homes. I am a personal example since I have gone to a neighborhood of one of my family members that in this article would describe as an architecture that excludes the outsiders, but for the reason the people of this particular neighborhood want more security their families.

Another point I see of this article in modern day America of exclusion that really catches my eye, is how many Americans of all races depending in the area they live in, well specifically suburban locations, prefer not to have transit stations or MARTA, anything of that sort due to their thinking of creating more traffic and bringing more violence in, and attracting more people living in poverty from the actual cities to those areas and get all the jobs; this breeds fear in people.

Overall, I see the point of having gates for security and the highways and signs as a fantastic way to be able to become more mobile and to have more opportunities. Now, in the part of racial discrimination, I feel it is an ignorant stupid way of thinking or being. I mean, Who wants to be excluded that way? or treated that way? Who wants to be forcibly thrown out of their homes? Is that humane? Is it moral to treat a person as a piece of trash? I don’t think so. Do you?

(Citation)

Schindler, Sarah. “Architectural Exclusion: Discrimination and Segregation Through Physical Design of the Built Environment.” Yale Law Journal. Yale Law Journal, Apr. 2015. Web. 23 Jan. 2016. <http://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/architectural-exclusion>.