finally, after 1½ hours of uncooperative internet...wtf

I really don't know when/how I'm gonna get this posted online, so I might just be printing it out and bringing it to class if I can't get the internet to work here.

But anyway, I didn't like either one of these articles. While reading Fiske's passage, I had my dislike of malls in the back of my head, which made me think the essay was dumb to begin with, because if I don't like malls, it would follow that I don't like reading about them. Regardless, I sludged through the text and digested it anyway.

Fiske makes a comparison in the first sentence that he uses throughout the passage, comparing a mall to a cathedral. Malls to me are more like a center of wastefulness. I feel like too many people waste their money in malls on overpriced products that are mostly unnecessary, as well as people with nothing better to do just hanging out there and wasting their time. The author brings both of these points up, but he seems to believe that the "proletarian shoppers" are a big problem. Personally, I think that they aren't a problem at all and that they shouldn't be bothered unless they're causing a distraction or something of that nature. Furthermore, people like this occupying any kind of public space is inevitable, since humans are social beings and this is a free opportunity to be with and meet other people. He also stresses a distaste for these "proletarian shoppers" throughout the passage, for example, he makes a somewhat belligerent comment to close his essay, making it seem like the window shoppers have a great super secret enormous gigantic tremendous master plan to viciously annihilate, emphatically destroy, vehemently remove, and forcefully exterminate the mall businesses. It seems to me that they're just bored teenagers with nothing better to do, with no hostile intent whatsoever.

In Mike Davis' essay "Fortress Los Angeles: The Militarization of Urban Space", he shows some of the same points as Fiske about public space; that the powerful should reign supreme over the weak. I found his essay a lot harder to believe than Fiske's, due to some of the events he describes. I wouldn't be surpised if any of it was exaggerated. He makes various points showing how people go out of their way to make life harder for homeless people, both city government and normal citizens. For example, the fact that sprinkler systems being installed to randomly go off in the middle of the night to scare away homeless people from sleeping there is absolutely ridiculous. For that same amount of money, you could give one of those people some shelter or something to help them along. It's rough having to live on the streets as a scavenger, and some of the events in this article are ridiculously inhumane and he makes it seem like people in Los Angeles have no sympathy at all for those poor people. This article made me emotionally upset the first time I read it, and going back to write about it the day afterwards has made that feeling worse. I don't really want to write any more and just forget about all of it.

Both Fiske and Davis brought up similar points about public space, but I don't find their points valid at all. I had a personal bias going into each article, and I believe it shows in my writing. Fiske's article was really stupid and pointless to me, it seems like he was trying too hard to make a point about something so mundane and commonplace in our society like a mall. Like I said earlier, people tend to go to places where there are other people due to our social nature, and nothing is going to stop that. In Davis' article, it's just hard to believe that people go out of their way to make life a living hell for people that have less than what they have.