5th Beloved

 Q3 Week 1 - Language for Power By Raymond Yu ( Ender's Game  by   Orson Scott Card )      Language has always been closely linked with power since it is one of the key ways of gaining and maintaining it. Power is the ability to control the outcome of a situation and is often determined by the amount of influence that can be exerted. Influence is gained through many means, and politicians have always been some of the biggest influencers of society.  Politicians who seek power must gain it through extensive campaigns, on which they deliver speeches to convince the populace that they are deserving of the power. Because politicians gain their power through the willing entrustment of it to them by the people (whether through honesty or wile), they are able the exert tremendous amounts of influence proportionate to the number of people and the strength of their trust in the politician. Oftentimes, through their power derived from language, politicians can s...

In August of 1921, Philip Zimbardo , a psychologist at Stanford University, wanted to test how a person’s role could influence their behavior. Curious about obedience, power dynamics, and the abuse of power, Zimbardo set up the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment to examine the effects of authority in a simulated prison environment. Twenty-four “mentally sound” participants were chosen for the experiment, and half would be prisoners, while the other half would be guards. The prison was simulated to be a harsh place that actual prisoners may have witnessed in a jail. Set up in the basement of a Stanford lab, tremendous efforts were taken to create a close simulation—even the arrests of the prisoners were unexpected and occurred in public. The guards had free range on how to treat the prisoners, with two conditions; they could not hit the prisoners, nor could they confine them for more than an hour. In Zimbardo’s search for an answer to the question that sparked this experiment, he and ...

     The first thing that comes to mind when I think about language and power is this one debate I had with my friend in 8th grade about the prompt: Is “too much” always a bad thing? The year was 2018. My friend was the type to spur random debates. The argument took place over Google Hangouts, as that was our main platform of communication at the time. I don’t exactly remember how we got to that point of the discussion, but I still stand by my reasoning. I was on the side saying “too much” is always bad and my friend was saying that it could be good. Their reasoning was that “well when has too much money ever been a problem?” I said that the term “too much” naturally has a negative connotation (just learned what the word connotation meant around that time), so by adding the statement along with any phrase, it is inherently a bad thing.      Eventually, after giving many similar examples, my friend came to the question, “Is there such a thing as too much pow...

nothing to something      I know bog posts are supposed to have titles, but I have no clue what to write about. I can talk all day about language and all but there's like no way to add power into it. Like look at the image above. Searching up articles about the topic is what I would do normally, but this?? I am not looking for the power of language I am looking for things about Language and Power. But I guess that's the only way the two can fit.     Now talking about power comes with one problem: politics. I have absolutely no interest in politics whatsoever but it is almost impossible to talk about power without politics. When it comes to power, many people have different opinions about it: many say that power is gained, and I really agree with this. Nobody is ever born powerful, they earn their respect with comes with power as well. But like always, "Great power comes with great responsibility."     When someone is in power, the first thing the...

Image Source The beginning of the 21st century was marked by the adoption of the internet into mainstream society, and the so-called “World Wide Web” was living up to the promise in its name. Everyone and their grandma were logging on, and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley (as they always do) saw the potential of a service which could connect the exponentially growing millions of people on the internet. Thus, in 2002, 2003, and 2004, Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook were founded to tackle this business opportunity—becoming the first social media networks. Nearly two decades later, it’s hard to imagine life without social media. Seven in ten Americans are active users of Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube—spending on average two and a half hours per day. When Facebook was down for just six hours on October 4th of 2021, it made front-page headlines across the world and introduced many to the groundbreaking notion of going outside.  As these platforms have captured the taps, swipes, and l...

Sierra Dellenbaugh Benedetti English 11 AP (What to write, what to write…) - 1/19 [12:40]  For the life of me, I could not figure out what to write on this topic. To be completely honest, I don’t really see the point of having topics for these posts when the whole point of them in the first place is to give everyone creative freedom. I was really happy with my first set in Language and Identity; I felt like I was able to express my true essence through my writing in the way I wanted to, and the words seemed to flow out onto the screen with ease. Language and America restricted that a little, but nonetheless I still felt like I put my thoughts out there and I generally liked what I wrote. However, this new topic has me extremely stuck. I couldn’t think of any way to discuss power without involving politics, and that can go south real quick. I found myself trying to write about how to take power out of politics, but it started sounding like another dull essay; I was even trying to fi...

Gambling With My Grade So You Won’t Have To by Sean Wang   “If dangerous ideas didn’t excite the imagination, we would never wander astray.”  - Heimerdinger from the TV show Arcane Man. Words cannot describe the sheer level of writer’s block that this quarter’s blog topic has placed upon me. As much as I hate to admit it, over the last three days, I have: Listened to POWER by Kanye West a total of 23 times Watched YouTube videos on power (in hindsight, maybe watching Ted-Ed videos on electric power wasn’t the brightest idea…) Asked non-APENG students on what they think about the concept of power And more… All of this was done in the hopes that I would find some slight yet substantial spark of inspiration that would lead me on my way. Needless to say, I did not succeed. So I began to think outside the box. Like a masterful detective in search of the elusive criminal mastermind (the blog post that I so desperately needed), I laid out the facts. The topic was Language and Power....

Yi-Kuan Cheng Benedetti AP English P5 18 January 2022 Quarter 3, A Punishment Worse Than Losing Almost as per tradition, each quarter I look at the new category for our blog post and each time, I am met with a word more vague than I ever thought possible. After heavy consideration, I’ve come to the same conclusion I’ve come to every other quarter: To relate a loosely connected and petty example of the topic into a full blown blog post. What is power? Personally, I believe that power is to be able to control someone or something. Therefore, how powerful a power is does not depend on how strong or how much control exuded, rather the situations in which the power can still be exerted. To truly be powerful, means to change someone’s emotions and intentions even when they are in a situation of the opposite. This brings me to my example of language and power. Oftentimes in online gaming, there are features in which users can communicate with other users through either a chat or “emote” syste...