Mackenzie Brown
August 25, 2014
Individuality Essay
There are many people in this world with similar ideas and opinions. After all, almost everyone has the same limitations on knowledge. We can pretty much access any information we need. It’s how we interpret that information, our beliefs, our interests, and the way we were raised that makes our opinions individual. But there are a lot of variables included in our makeup. There are a lot of things we hear and see that affect our opinions, and ultimately our individuality. That’s what led me to my guiding question, which is: “How do the people around us and the media affect our individuality?”
To start off my research, I read the book The Dead-Tossed Waves by Carrie Ryan. This book is about a girl who has her entire life changed in a short time period. It isn’t easy for her to adjust, but her friends support and inspire her, and by the end of the novel, she has a new-found confidence. The next book I read was An Abundance of Katherines by John Green. In this book, Colin Singleton, a grown-up child prodigy, believes that he needs to be a “genius” in order to be content. After time spent in a new place with new people, he discovers just how wrong he had been. I finished off my novel research with Paper Towns, also by John Green. In this book, Quinn gets to know his neighbor Margo. After a series of adventures and Margo’s disappearance, Quinn begins to understand what Margo’s words had meant, and he was changed by this experience.
The web pages I found during research were Buzzle, AmericaNowNews, and I-Web. It was difficult to find anything about my topic, so I eventually branched off into different topics and found things that were related. I have discovered that certain aspects of media are helpful and inspiring, but other parts are thoroughly manipulating. People are like that too; we can help each other grow, or we can tear each other down. Both positive and negative things affect our individuality, even though it seems that sometimes we’re more vulnerable to the negative effects.
To answer my guiding question, I first needed a good image of people. I picture our minds with cracks and holes and openings where words and actions can sink in. Sometimes it’s helpful, and it fills us up like cement, but sometimes it’s just toxic, disfiguring gas that makes those openings even emptier than before. The media gives us knowledge, and it can inspire us and magnify our interests. But we’ve all been told time after time not to depend on technology too much. That means the information we read online, hear on radios, or see on the news, too. That information isn’t always correct, but we lean on it. It’s helpful, and we’re lazy, so we let them think for us. That can have a major effect on who you are. And, no matter how much we could continue to deny it, we all rely on each other for survival. We seek each other’s approval and acceptance all the time- it’s in our nature. Nearly every person you come in contact with has an effect on you- some people more than others. For example, when you look up to someone, you may strive to be more like them. You may open your eyes a bit more, stretch a bit to try and see things the way they see them. That kind of situation could help you to be more open-minded to the world, and to everyone else’s opinions, too. I could quite possibly continue on with this topic for hours. The answer to my question cannot fit into a paragraph, and perhaps it can’t even fit into my head. There are many, many ways that our individuality could be changed. It just goes on and on, and it simply deserves more than a page.
