Cultural industries Personal Statement Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3250 words

Cultural industries - Personal Statement Example However all theorists tend to agree that the cultural industries have an important influence on our daily lives. Within these texts circulated we find symbols and meanings. Are the cultural industries just there to make money and serve the interests of their owners' Or are we as an audience able to take what we want from them and look at them with a decisive nature. The best contributions to such debates suggest the complete, negotiated and often indirect nature of media influence, but of one thing there can be no doubt: the media do have an influence. We are influenced by informational texts, such as newspapers, broadcast news programs, documentaries and analytical books. We are moreover influenced by entertainment. Films, TV serials, comics, music, video games and so on provide us with recurring representations of the world and thus act as a kinf of reporting. Just in the same way, they crucially influence our privet lives while ruling by our fantasies, emotions and identities. The great amount of time that we spend absorbing texts produced by cultural industries make the latter a powerful factor that affects lives of many people. Knowledge of texts circulation helps to deal with the problem of cultural industries effects on people's lives. ... First, it is important to note that most texts that people consume are under circulation of influential corporations. These corporations work on profit basis and are created to support their interest in getting revenues from their activity. In societies where the cultural industries are big business, cultural industry companies tend to support conditions in which large companies and their political allies ca make money: conditions where there is constant demand for new products, minimal regulation by the state outside of general competition law, relative political and economic stability, workforces that are willing to work hard and for low payment and other conditions that result in big profits for such companies. However, in contemporary societies not all texts exist on such conditions. Many of them are based on non-profit conditions aimed at orienting their audience towards ways of thinking that do not coincide with the interest of capitalism, or of structured domination by men ove r women, or institutional racism. The reasons why such companies exist vary. From one hand, they are partly created for the simple economic reason that cultural companies have to compete with each other, as well as support general conditions of doing business. Competition leads to outrun of one company by another in search of meeting expectations of the audience. From another hand, such companies exist because of social and cultural factors deeply rooted in many societies. When it comes to are and entertainment, the competition is great and the audience is highly demanding and therefore, it is important for cultural industries to follow the rules of doing business in this area and to propose the audience those text that would best fit its requirements, either texts

The history of the number zero Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

The history of the number zero - Research Paper Example For instance, the numbers 2011 and 211 represent two different numbers and have completely different sense. Secondly, zero is used in its form as a number itself i.e. 0. Both the above mentioned uses of zero have been exceedingly important. Yet, the two above described uses of zero cannot report historical evidence of creation of zero. It would not have been so easy for the term and idea behind the invention of the number to be widely accepted and used. The number and term zero has not been spontaneously derived concept. It took a huge period to develop the concept and use of zero as a name and a symbol (O'Connor and Robertson, 2000). Zero as a number, symbol and a concept has been indeed important and is known possibly worldwide for its significant usage. The recognition, apprehension and functioning of zero has been the fundamental of the world now that today, zero fulfils a key role in mathematics as the real numbers, additive identity of the integers, and a lot of other algebraic structures. In addition, the concept of zero can be employed in calculus, accounting, finance, statistics, computers, and particularly in today's connected world. The development of zero from being merely a placeholder to the driver of calculus has crossed centuries, and involved diverse and extensively great cognitive thinking, both in extent and scope globally (Kaplan and Seife, 2002). As a concept, zero indicates ‘nothing’ or ‘naught’. â€Å"How can nothing be something?† is a question that ancient Greeks asked themselves. Records have shown that they seemed to be uncertain about the interpretation of zero as a number. The creation and status of zero has led to philosophical and religious arguments by Middle-ages (Bourbaki, 1998). As a matter of fact, today’s Arabic number system has originated in India, but is comparatively newly developed. From the beginning, people have been labeling amounts and measures with a variety of figures and sy mbols throughout centuries, while facing difficulties in performing most elementary arithmetic computations with those number systems. A counting system had been first developed by the Sumerians as they wanted to mark and keep the accounts of the quantities of their goods such as cattle, horses, and donkeys. The drawback regarding the Sumerian system was that the system was positional which means that the positioning of a specific symbol as compared to others denoted its value. Around 2500 BC, Akkadians handed down The Sumerian system and in 2000 BC, the same was done by the Babylonians. The evolution of zero seems to have initiated from the Babylonians which has crossed may centuries and was very different from the symbol know to us today. Babylonians were the first to ideate a mark to to make it realized that a number had been missing from a column. For instance, 0 in the number 2011 expresses that there are no hundreds in that number. By that time zero did not have any symbol to denote the space. Although Ancient Greeks have brought many famous mathematicians who learned the basic principles of their mathematics from the Egyptians and they had a number system, but that system lacked a placeholder like the one of Babylonians so they could not suggest a name to indicate that empty space. They might have contemplated the name to denote that place between numbers, but there is no such evidence to draw conclusion that the symbol even