St. Bernard's Death

I really am quite annoyed by St. Bernard. I was really making progress today but I was shot down: my access was denied. GAHHHHH. On top of feeling like my head is in a pressure tank, I want to destroy St. Bernard.

Kind of on my nerves

So silly iTunes refuses to let me but Kid Nation because it won't update my payment option. I keep trying and it says that I cannot do what i need it to do at this time. GAHHHH. i really need to start watching it and such. bleh.

Progress Report 2- I almost forgot to post this sucker

Sources

Community People and my sister Megan have been the most useful sources. The sources below are the ones I have found useful. I have read a lot more articles and spent a lot more time researching than what I have found to be useful. It is hard to find anything about Kid Nation that isn’t solely about child abuse and labor laws. I have begun to look into children psychology in relation to TV. All I get about that is violence on TV and how that affects kids. It seems like I need to find the right search terms to find what I want…bleh.

http://www.articlearchives.com/government-public-administration/government-bodies/531537-1.html

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1661705,00.html

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2007/12/kid_nation_finale_thus_ends_the.html

http://www.tvweek.com/news/2007/07/the_founding_of_kid_nation.php


Inquiry statement

I am curious to know what kind of “modern” society and government system in Kid Nation was forming and how certain factors affected the outcome.


Questions

Just to begin:
How was Kid Nation manipulated by editing?
How were the children’s actions driven by the cash reward?
How were the children’s actions driven by the cameras?
How were the children’s actions guided by the production team?
What do the children’s reactions to ethical and societal dilemmas tell the viewer about the progress of the society?
How was the growth/development of the society manipulated or skewed by production?
What type of society was Kid Nation becoming?
What type of government system did Kid Nation resemble? What type of governmentwere they becoming?
How was the society's growth affected by age?


Reflection

I never knew how important the right search terms were in researching. If you don’t word your search the right way, a whole bunch of unrelated articles will pop up; it is very frustrating. I haven’t found keywords just yet, and that is sort of scary. I know the information is out there, it is just being able to get my hands on it.

I didn’t really have anything to focus on until Tuesday night. I really love this topic though. It feels very promising, and I am quite excited to work with it. This is right up my ally, so I hope that it all works out.

My most instrumental source this week was my older sister. She really helped me organize some of my thoughts, as well as calm me down. I didn’t even remember Kid Nation until she reminded me. It is overwhelming to think that I have all this researching and writing to do and that both of these will need an immense amount of brain power.

I think I have I good set of criteria for my research. I feel like I can be more specific in what I am looking for, but this is hard to do at the moment because I have not bought the season yet. The research element of my thesis would have to do with child psychology, societal trends, and government systems. The rest would be my own analysis of the show. Sooo yup.

O Goodness

I would like to thank my very helpful community today in class for letting me bounce ideas off of them. It was much appreciated. :)

As I said, today in class I was just chatting away trying to sort out some of my ideas. We mainly talked about my concept of working with the beloved TV. We tried to marry my concepts of crime and television. We asked why Americans were so obsessed with crime show such as Law and Order and CSI and why these shows continuously top the charts. Most of this discussion however really didn't get me much further.

I tried talking to a few other people about my ideas but they were all dead beats. It was nice of them to take their time to talk about it with me though. I did however have the piece of mind to ring up my sister who went through this process of picking a topic only two years ago. She was a major help. I am going to post some of her pointers on the main blog thing.

What Megan mainly reminded me of was this show that we used to watch, Kid Nation. I know a few fellow classmates also watched this show, it was pretty insane, I know. It was perhaps one of the most interesting social experiments of the past few decades. I still have to sort out a few of my thoughts about how I am going to use Kid Nation because if I try to explain them now, I will sound like a blabbering idiot. I am kinda excited about this one. It seems to show more promise than the other things I have thought of. So whoop-de-do...for now.