User:ElenaRobles33/sandbox

Article evaluation: "Digital Literacy"

 * Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?
 * The first thing I notice is the warning on the top of the page that the article has many issues and should be improved. As a reader, that does not give me much confidence in what I am about to read, especially considering that some of the issues noted have to do with citation. Other than this, I believe the content is all relevant. I believe it is especially important that the section about the different applications of digital literacy is important to understanding what it really looks like.
 * Is the article neutral? Are there any claims, or frames, that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?
 * While reading, I never felt a very strong bias. However there were a few claims made that did not feel like they were backed up with evidence. For example this statement, "Subsequently, integrating technology into the classroom in a meaningful way, exposes students to a range of literacy practices called multi-literacies which broadens their outlook and widens vistas of information and knowledge which is highly constructive" feels very much like an opinion.
 * Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?
 * I believe the viewpoints from different sides are all equally represented and explained. Although, it should be noted that I see more references that discuss the advantages of digital literacy, promoting the argument for this type of work in schools, and I see less evidence sustaining a counter argument.
 * Check a few citations. Do the links work? Does the source support the claims in the article?
 * the first citation does not have a link that is working, but the others ones seem to be fine. Looking at the citations and sources of evidence, they appear to be strong and trustworthy sources, however there is a warning at the top of the page that the citations are not correctly done.
 * Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?
 * other than the few times at the beginning where I felt like the sentence was not backed up by anything and came off as an opinion, the rest of the article has correct referencing with sources that appear reliable and neutral.
 * Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added?
 * the information is not out of date because all of the sources used are from the last 10 years, while the majority are from withing 2 to 5 years.
 * Check out the Talk page of the article. What kinds of conversations, if any, are going on behind the scenes about how to represent this topic?
 * there are many criticisms on the talk page about the information in this article. I think it is rightly noted that there is not enough information in this article about English literacy and how it merges with the digital. There is a whole section on the talk page discussing this missing part. I also agree with one of the sections that discusses how the author has fallen short in explaining that digital literacy is not just about being able to use technology but that it is important to teach different forms of communication.
 * How is the article rated? Is it a part of any WikiProjects?
 * it is rated as mid-level importance, or C-class. It is a part of 4 WikiProjects: education, computing, linguistics/ applied linguistics, and internet.
 * How does the way Wikipedia discusses this topic differ from the way we've talked about it in class?
 * this article and the talk page discusses this topic in a more practical sense, by bringing in more examples of how it is used in every day life, and especially by students.

The Event
As locals fill Fort Marcy park in Santa Fe the Friday before labor day, Las Fiestas de Santa Fe have officially begun with the Zozobra tradition. If people were unable to add their documents that fill the Marionette before the event, and they still wish to, there is a "gloom tent" that offers a box for people to still drop their contributions to the Marionette's stuffing. There are food trucks spread around the park that offer local New Mexican cuisine, navajo tacos, lemonade, and turkey legs. Zozobra stands tall at the head of the field, with his appearance changing every year. First, local bands perform and then when nightfall arrives, the fire dancers come out. The “Fire spirit dancer” dressed in all red with a flowing headdress, carries two flaming torches, to symbolize Old Man Gloom’s arch enemy. She is accompanied by the small "glooms," which are children dressed in white dancing alongside her. The fire dancer's role is to scare away her little companions, as she represents the light that sends away the gloom and bad energy of the year. This dance portion of the night started with Jacques Cartier who performed as the spirit dancing role for 37 years after serving as a New York ballet dancer and later, a dancer instructor. One of Cartier’s students, James Lilienthal succeeded his instructor as the spirit dancer in 1970 and played this role for 30 years, who then passed it along to his daughter. Helene Luna now performs as the Fire Spirit dancer each year, as a Santa Fe native herself. While the dancers perform on stage under the shadow of Zozobra, which is in fact a functioning marionette, begins to move his arms and head. Then, as he is famously known, Zozobra begins to move his mouth to let out an ominous groan, voiced by another local, to express his feeling of gloom against his nemesis of fire. After the dance performance is over, fireworks attached to the marionette set off and catch him on fire. Thus begins the burning. It is customary for the spectators to begin chanting “burn him” as the figure made of chicken wire, wood, and muslin becomes engulfed in flame. The public is warned that this event may be frightening to young children. The puppet filled with anonymous letters, divorce paper, mortgages, even hundreds of police reports donated by the Santa Fe Police Department, comes burning to the ground. After he finally collapses, a firework show takes place over the burning pile of the puppet. In ticket and food sales, the celebration currently raises over 300,000 dollars used for scholarships, charity, and grants for the Kiwanis club, which sponsors and holds the rights to this event. Zozobra has been used as a fundraising event since 1964 when the rights were given to the Kiwanis club.

New Article Outline "The Lolita Effect"
I will write an article on the “Lolita Effect” named after Vladimir Nabokov’s character Lolita, in his book Lolita written in 1955, to represent the problem with the sexualization of young girls within societal institutions and media sources. The concept also describes the tendency for society to blame the girls for their own sexualization and abuses they may receive from males, or the rest of society in general. There are many components in popular media that influence and pressure girls into meeting a specific stereotype, for instance with famous role female role models generally presenting themselves in a sexual way or with the body style of barbies, and then blame them for adhering to these stereotypes and the male abuses that follow them.

Outline:

I. background: description of Lolita effect (describe sexual deviance...) and Lolita novel

II. In Nabokov's time: girls in the fifties

-->(Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth. "Lolita." Literature and Its Times Supplement 1: Profiles of 300 Notable Literary Works and the Historical Events that Influenced Them, by Joyce Moss, vol. 2: The Great Depression and the New Deal to Future Times (1930s -), Gale, 2003, pp. 279-286. Gale Virtual Reference Library, login.libproxy.scu.edu/login?url= http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GVRL&sw=w&u=sant38536&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CCX2875200097&it=r&asid=d00428a2bdf47bbf3375173f0316b0a3 . Accessed 2 Nov. 2017.)

-->Breines, Wini. Young, White, and Miserable: Growing up Female in the Fifties. Beacon Press, 1992.

III. modern take

--> https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=8d8oDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT24&dq=lolita+effect&ots=YUjJP3n9im&sig=x17VpWP_DaCcgbNVCTYJsqQ3nNI#v=onepage&q=lolita%20effect&f=false

--> https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/cconsp18&div=5&g_sent=1&casa_token=&collection=journals

--> https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-012-0183-x

"The Lolita Effect" article draft 1
“The Lolita effect” is a term derived from Vladimir Nabokov’ s novel Lolita, written in 1955. It was dubbed by Meenakshi Gigi Durham in her 2009 novel, The Lolita effect: the media sexualization of young girls and what we can do about it, but has since taken new forms and interpretations. Durham refers to it as the social construct, often found in forms of media, of myths and falsities surrounding female sexuality. The effect is said to hinder the healthy development of pre-adolescent and adolescent sexuality in girls by distorting the concept of it, often with oversexualizing images and pressure to adhere to these images. The term also has come to refer to the blame that can be put on young females for their part in abuse or harassment that they face; similar to the phrases “slut-shaming” or “victim-blaming.”

Origin: Nabokov’s Lolita
The book follows the story of a man, Humbert Humbert, who narrates memories of parts of his childhood and then his pursuit of his step daughter, who he fell in love with. The pre-adolescent girl, Lolita, undergoes mental, emotional, and physical abuse from Humbert throughout the novel during their strange relationship which forms after her mother dies and he gains custody over her. This novel prompted controversial reactions that lead to the coinage of the term “Lolita Effect.”

Some critics and readers reacted to the publication in the fifties in a way that partially blamed the character Lolita for the events that took place throughout the novel. Many claimed that Lolita represented an outlier among women for her choices in being sexual at such a young age, and therefore was at least partly responsible for the sexual abuse that she faced. Many readers in the fifties adhered to Humbert’s depiction of his step daughter, viewing her as a seductress and a sexual deviant, far outside the norm for a girl her age. Humbert often refers to Lolita as a “nymphet,” which he defines as a sexually precocious child usually between the age of nine and fourteen. This is how he distinguishes her from others her age, as being a more mature and sexually adept woman than her body implies, to explain why he so fancies her. Especially when he finds out that Lolita has already been intimate with a boy while at camp and has also been experimenting with other girls sexually, Humbert uses this as evidence that she is different than other girls her age, able and willing to consent to his treatment of her, though she is only twelve years old. The narrator also vividly explains the physical sexual encounters that take place between the two of them and many readers agree that Lolita is sometimes described as being a fairly active participant.

(New heading?)
Readers adhering to Humbert’s depiction believed Lolita was a different kind of twelve-year-old who could be blamed for the sexual treatment from her step-father who was three times her age. This reaction to the novel has been attributed to the time in which it was published. According to critics and experts of this postwar time, the fifties presented a difficult tension of irony for young women trying to navigate adolescence. The duplicitous expectations that were so apparent in the fifties is ascribed to an increase in sexuality presented through the lens of prominent social figures. Highly sexual and romantic, this era showed transformations in media and entertainment, with the glorification of sex and a focus on female appearance taking a forefront in advertising. The influence of movies and magazines, which often promoted sex and glamour, encouraged preteen and teenage girls to become consumers of sexualized images. However, the irony takes place in the fact that also prevalent at this time were strict family values that expected women to refrain from sexual exploration and evade an individual sexual identity.

Family ideals were a primary source of pressure placed on females to deny any individual sexuality in America after World War II. Between 1946 and 1960, the number of teens in the United States more than doubled, from 5.6 million to 11.8 million, making youth culture more prominent than any other time in history. Although sex had become more culturally recognized and sexual experimentation was known to be popular in the youth culture, and thus hugely influential over all of society, girls were pressured away from such activity. Females felt the threat of losing their respectability if they participated in the way they were encouraged to, in both appearance and action.

Kinsey reports
Kinsey reports were released in the 1950’s and were immensely controversial for the time (Cite). They not only openly discussed sexuality, but revealed the prevalence of sex in day to day life of the average American. This came as shocking to the general public at a time when the family life was expected to by void of many sexual endeavors: innocent and private in nature. However, these reports specifically blew open the commonly accepted idea that females are not sexual beings. By revealing that women not only enjoy sex, but also masturbate regularly, these reports helped to debunk the myth of women’s sexual innocence and naivete.

Modern viewpointCs that lead to the Lolita Effect (shorter heading)
Readers of Nabokov’s novel generally no longer side with Humbert’s adaptation of Lolita; they now promote the feminist theory that female sexuality is no different than male and recognize Freudian concept that acknowledge preadolescent desire as more normal than deviant. Therefore, critics adopting a more feminist reading of Nabokov’s novel, no longer place any blame on Lolita for the abuse she withstood by the older men in her life. Rather, they recognize that it was her normal childhood desire that was then mutilated and manipulated by Humbert. However, modern critics find very similar attributes in society as those did after the publication of Lolita in the 1950’s as discussed previously. Readers still recognize that in modern culture is predominant presence of the sexualization of young girls and the objectification of females in media that leads to a tendency to blame girls for issues such as rape and sexual harassment.

In her essay, “Lolita Is in the Eye of the Beholder,” Margaret McGladrey emphasizes the amount messages in the media that targeted toward girls in Lolita’s age range. These messages tend to promote products and services to “appear, dress, speak, groom, and pose” to achieve a sexually attractive appearance. According to McGladrey and other critics, these messages and advertisements in media promote a “real-life nymphet aesthetic." An issue that critics such as McGladrey is the age the media begins to target this pressure on girls. For instance, the culture of beauty pageants for girls under age 16 or even Walmart advertisements for “Naughty” or “sexy” Halloween costume for young girls. Experts have began studying the psychological consequences of such societal pressure. According to the American Psychology Association Task Force (2007), the product marketing towards young girls in ways that treat them as if they were more mature and sexual adept can disrupt cognition, lead to an increase of shame, depression, anxiety, eating disorder patterns, lessened self-esteem, and even the stunting of healthy sexual development.

A video found on the APA’s website contains interviews with girls Lolita’s age describing their experience with a culture that expects them to dress, look, and act a certain way, as well as the way it affects men's attention on them. Many said it made them feel “gross” and embarrassed about their bodies, all feeling like this should not be something they have to worry about at this age. The girls also said that they are often judged and then afraid to dress in the style that was popular for girls according to their role models in media because they are told it is overly sexual (APA).

Critiques
Some critics of this term and the "moral panic" surrounding the topic is represents find that it is oversimplified and overemphasizes a linear progression of female sexuality. Some critics, while acknowledging the issue of sexualization in media and popular culture, especially towards young girls, think that the way researchers and authors have gone about discussing the problem has lead to a drawing of "moral boundaries around (hetero)normative and age-appropriate notions of girlhood sexuality," which in turn leads to an isolated definition of what is acceptable sexual desire and practice for these girls. These critics claim that the scholarship that envelops the "Lolita Effect" argues a high degree of "Otherness," which has been mainstreamed in this debate as a paedophilic gaze. These scholars also believe that the "Lolita Effect" term and subsequent research and debate rightly points out blurred "generational transitions and spatial (virtual) boundaries," or the connection between innocence and sexuality, creating a "new proto-sexual girl child." However, the argument in turn normalizes the non-linear, reversible transition into womanhood. It does so in several ways. Firstly, the argument about sexualizing young premature girls rightly brings popular attention to the harmful effects of the media but there is little analysis or research of how girls navigate and interact daily with the media and how that makes a difference in their exposure. Along with this, it fails to acknowledge the individual sexual agency of girls, involving their rights and pleasure. This includes how sexual desire on the girls' part can also be a part of the issue. Thus there is a point to be made about "self-sexual objectification." These critics believe the current scholarship overemphasizes terms such as "protectionism, victimization and objectification." There is also a manifestation of a binary between male and female, the males playing the role of the active, sexual predator against the woman who plays the passive sexuality with no desire or agency. This leads to an assumption that any female sexual activity is considered risky. Also, as the argument develops a linear path of female sexuality, it also creates the assumption of a ‘healthy’ heterosexuality. Finally, critics argue that the argument surrounding "The Lolita Effect" is effectively an argument among the white middle-class that creates a moral panic over a "loss of a highly raced and classed sexual innocence,"which then leads to a different problem involving an "othering." Essentially, these scholars argue that the discussion currently neglects the working-class and the issue of a "racialized hyper-sexuality."