I developed a LOVE for this song for multiple reasons:
The beat just makes you want to get up, wave your hands and dance. no?!?
The song debuted during my trip out to New York (it’s really become my NY anthem)
Alicia’s hook is really inspiring and you know you want to sing along!
In New York,
Concrete jungle where dreams are made of,
Theres nothing you can’t do,
Now you’re in New York,
These streets will make you feel brand new,
The lights will inspire you,
Lets here it for New York, New York, New York
One hand in the air for the big city,
Street lights, big dreams all looking pretty,
No place in the World that can compare,
Put your lighters in the air, everybody say yeaaahh
Come on, come,
yeah,
In New York,
Concrete jungle where dreams are made of,
Theres nothing you can’t do,
Now you’re in New York,
These streets will make you feel brand new,
The lights will inspire you,
Lets here it for New York, New York, New York
Before I go discuss further some of you may still not fully understand ‘social media‘. I like to think it as media that is socially disseminated online. The web and Internet supports and continues to accelerate this type of communication and human interaction. It allows individuals to form communities. Again, due to the web there are no clear definitions for community. You might be wondering – I know I have – what constitutes a community. Schools? Towns? Companies? Forums? MySpace groups? Facebook fan pages? Tech sites? Fashion sites? Do they need to be off-line or on-line? I would say that all that I’ve listed rightfully can be deemed a community. More and more things are becoming if it already hasn’t, a blur. I tell you, technology. Crazy.
At the same time it’s wonderful. It’s paved the way and brought us 2009 Fashion Week shows right into our own homes.
At this point, fashion bloggers and enthusiasts around the world can all become fashion market editors. Next season, we can watch shows during dinner right in the comfort of our own home with friends! Don’t get me wrong, I would still attend shows over watching them with friends It used to be SO exclusive and you would starve to attend the shows, NOW, times are changing and things are definitely becoming more open. All industries are clearly modifying their business models and PR/marketing strategies. For the fashion industry, however, I’m excited to see how we will embrace these changing times.
Is it wrong to use sexual power for personal gain?
As I stand in front of my mirror, I ask myself, “is this too much?” Is there sort of a blurred boundary in our culture/society that suggest it to be taboo for a woman to “use what she’s got”? I mean, you could argue from both sides, … but after reading this article by Nancy Hass, I feel confident more than ever that as a woman, you should never settle, ”you have to ask yourself how much your sexuality is integral to your very being. And you have to be willing to take the blows if being true to that hold you back in your career.”
This past semester I studied that the male gaze, everything in movies, films, and media, for example, is from the perspective of a male staring at the woman, “males see while females are meant to be seen.” Many theorists and experts, such as Laura Mulvey would argue this point, and say that this notion is also prevalent in all our surrounding advertisements. I sometimes wonder if for some women the idea of women being subjected to a male gaze develops into a sort of an empowerment, an authorization … because “as long as sexuality is an organic by-product of self confidence, not the other way around, it may be a force for good, out lasting youth and its accompanying self-doubt and inexperience.”
“Obviously there remain a few clear boundaries: It’s tacky to flash cleavage at work, and sleeping your way to the top is demeaning and fraught with peril. But, in an era when displaying femininity is no longer automatically dismissed as a sign of weakness, surely that’s not all there is to say.”
“What if your sexiness if without intent, if its simply integral to your personality – are you morally bound to suppress?”
These past couple months I’ve spent more time than I thought on the topic of video games. The industry of video games is big, huge, gigantic, big, huge (you get the idea). To enlighten you on just how big the gaming industry is I’ll share with you some information …
1) Sixty-eight percent of households in the US play computer or video games
The industry profits through multiple platforms. Meaning, games come in many and different formats, there are console games, games that can be played with roommates, virtual reality games, games online played in real reality, this is one. Did you know the average gamer is now 30 years old? Really? Yup. Companies are fully taking advantage of this market, and more are tailoring their games to their consumers. For example, this Fashion Week video game expected to come out soon…
“A Fashion Week video game is coming out next year. No, seriously. Created by 505 Games, IMG, and world-renowned makeup artist Pat McGrath, the game will offer players a “true insider’s point of view” of Fashion Week. It will include “world-class industry gurus,” models, and celebrities, and will be available for the iPhone and for Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony consoles. Women ranging in age from pre-teen to mid-thirties are the target audience. But who among them plays video games in their idle hours? Fashion people are supposed to spend their free time going to parties, shopping, drinking, getting body scrubs, BlackBerrying, and looking at themselves in the mirror — not playing video games. Unless a certain new fad in the world of gaming has created a feverish interest in the pastime among editors and designers and fashion aspirants — the Wii Fit. (Perhaps by now it’s not the absolute latest cutting-edge technology to come out of the video-game world, but what the hell do we know about video games?)”
Nowthat everything is transferring to the online world, it’s important to know what sites there are and which ones are best for the information you need. Below is a list of fashion sites that you should take a look at. We have so much information and sites that cater to different needs, we are truly living in an age of information overload. We know the next big thing is for information aggregators, for example bloglines. this is great to get all the articles you favor and it neatly organizes all your content
Before I go off track … I found an interesting site where you can sell and trade your clothes with other people online, Our Threads is a space for people to gather and mutually benefit from one another. I have not tried their services yet, so I can’t say much about it, if you have, how is it? But, the first homepage site, I think, can be aesthetically better…
I was reading on Mashableabout the top social sites in fashion, they listed 25+ infashion news, lifestyle sites, outfit tools, shopping and selling, social sites …
“Fashion News
Glam.com - A mixture of fashion watching, celebrity news, health and more.
InStyle.com - The fashion and trends counterpart to People magazine.
LuckyMag.com - The online counterpart to Lucky, has features such as “Cute Outfit Of The Day” and “Bargains Under $50″
Vogue.com - What list of fashion would be complete without Vogue? “
I’ve been reluctant to write about twitter, why? It has become a part of our culture and you hear about it at LEAST once a day.
but, it’s a phenomenon:
News, celebrities (remember the Ashton Kutcher and CNN battle for twitter followers),
you name it…
I took a social media course with Howard Rheingold, who just happens to paint his own shoes and is an “online instigator, educator, offline gardner” and we were required to tweet – hear his talk on TED, Way-new Collaboration on the “coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action” here…
U.S. Department of State invited Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, to discuss new media communication opportunities in Iraq
So, I just finished my studying for the night and started reading through the Fashion and Style section of The New York Times, and guess what I see “The Twitter Guys“.
(btw, I (and some other classmates) hadlunch with Biz Stone – he shared his knowledge on twitter, he was nice, the twitter team themselves didn’t realize twitter’s potential for information exchange till later ….
The hype surrounding twitter is exciting and stirs curiosity, I hear at least once a week “I wonder what’s next for twitter?”
For now, I know that twitter has more traffic than the Wall Street Journal and New York Times Online, gave birth to a new vocabulary (oh, don’t act like you’ve never heard them before): tweet, tweep twit, tweet- ___, twitterverse, twittazone, tweetback, tweetup, tweople, …get definitions here, its my source for news, information, to find out what friends are doing, find out what the expert superstars are reading, what’s yours?
It used to be SO exclusive and you would starve to attend the shows, NOW, times are changing and things are definitely becoming more open. All industries are clearly modifying their business models and PR/marketing strategies. For the fashion industry, however, I’m excited to see how we will embrace these changing times.
