Response to Mariah

Why do you think that people feel the need to label people?  What is the point of it?

                I think one reason that people feel the need to label each other is for easy recall. We meet so many people all the time that we cannot remember them all by name but we can recognize them by qualities. These labels reduce people to one easily recognizable label that is often offensive, so they should be discouraged especially when they upset people. It makes to use a label say if you ask where someone’s office is and someone answers right behind that blonde girl or something like that. It can make things easier to label. Someone might say something like do you remember Rachel from biology class. Their friend says no and they answer she was that shy kid who was always in the corner. This is a label and one that can be damaging to the person it is assigned to, but it does make description easier. Labels are methods of recognition and people may use them without realizing that they are hurting people. Others may use labels to bully because they are insecure with something in their own life or they just feel the need to strike out. Labels can also be how people define themselves. If someone has been called shy for years they may never even attempt to break out of that behavior because they have come to associate it with who they are. A person may also feel that they are determined and because they do not want to lose this definition of themselves that they feel is positive they work harder than they would have without the label. In cases where someone acts in ways that fit a label that they like they may want to be defined by this characteristic by other people. Labels are as often based on positive qualities as negative, but this in no way negates the horrible consequences that labeling often has.

                How can people who have been labeled throughout their childhood break out of that label without moving or going to college? Do labels become so ingrained that people cannot move past them sometimes?

Response to Katherine

                I think it is healthy for people to fear and inevitable for people to fear. People should not try to simply not fear, but should recognize that when they fear something there is probably a reason. Once they realize where their fear is coming from they can use reason to overcome it. If someone is scared of spiders, they may be scared of being bitten. Once they realize that their fear is really of being bitten they could recognize that poisonous spiders in their area are rare and they are more than likely to come to no harm. They may see a spider and think I fear this. Then they weigh the aspects of it that make it dangerous verse the ones that do not and if the positives of doing something outweigh the negatives they will probably be able to overcome their fear. Once they do so every subsequent time they face that situation their fear will lessen. If the negative consequences outweigh the positives, say in the case of fearing black widow spiders, the fear is healthy because the situation is dangerous and it should not be overcome. Fear is a positive natural instinct that keeps people from doing things that can hurt them and when it serves this purpose it is a great survival skill. It is when we fear things that are not really dangerous that fear needs to be worked through and dissipated. Fearing getting in a car with a drunk driver is healthy. Fearing lightning is not. It is easy to see how common fears developed as means to keep people safe. If one fears all snakes, then they are less likely to go no near a piousness one, but people do not need to be defined by their instincts and they can overcome instinctual fears.

                Do you think that certain people do not succeed in life because of a fear of failing?     

Response to Catherine

                I do not think that the government should have any control over what is said on the internet, but organizations that own the websites do. Any website that allows comments has the right to remove comment that they deem inappropriate. People do have a right to express themselves, but there is a time and a place, even on the internet. Facebook, to use an example you mentioned, has a right to remove certain content that is discriminatory or hateful towards others. By using the site you are allowing them that control which I’m sure is something they include in their policy agreement. The government should not have any control over content on any site that is not owned and operated by the government. If the government controlled the internet, they would be able to limit information that calls themselves or their policies into question and people need to be able to question the government. Even if information on the internet were put through a filter, that filter would either miss many of the sites that were intended to be censored for whatever content is deemed appropriate, or it would take out many sites that were perfectly appropriate but used some word that could be taken as vulgar or discriminatory. Say the government banned sexually explicit sites and sites about sexually transmitted diseases were taken out because the language is the same. This seems likely because the internet is so huge that it would take a machine to censor all the information, but the machine would have to recognize the information somehow. Keywords would be one simple way to do so. If they had people check sites and censor the internet they could not get much done because it is so expansive. It seems to me that if the government were to censor the internet it would be done much the same way as it is with television. This would mean the targets for censorship would be discriminatory works, but they would also be sexual and vulgar sites. Since the internet is not specified in the first amendment, the same way that television is not, once the government got a start censoring they could potentially expand. Right now books are not censored, but television is with reasons cited such as its invading the privacy of the home. Kids could accidentally see it without the parents having actually brought the material home as you have to do when purchasing a novel. The same is true with the internet. I think any censorship of the internet by the government is a slippery slope to eroding important aspects of freedom of speech and information.

                Do you think that sites like Google or Yahoo should have the ability to remove sites from their searches because of content that does not meet their standards?