Interviews & Survey Question [HW #56]

[Part I]
1. Do you have particular character(s) from TV/books/movies that you look up to? If so, who and why? [Ask for description of character]
2. How has that character affected you?
3. Describe your interaction/relationship [with a similar situation/person in life] Do you find it similar to your character's approach to them.
4. Do you frequently update your status (on AIM, Facebook, Twitter, etc.)? How often?

[Part II]
Interview #1
1. Yes, there are particular characters from TV/books that I look up to, generally the characters that are similar to myself, sort of the "nice and quiet" character. For example, in the movie, 27 dresses, she is the bridesmaid, the one most of her friends would turn to when they need help. I look up to her because she was able to help herself in the end instead of constantly putting others before herself.

2. This character affects me because it allows me to consider ways to overcome my own similar situation.

3. My interaction with a similar situation to the character in 27 dresses, is that I find a way to allow my helping others to help me as well. I take an optimist outlook on how being there for others is a benefit to me.

4. I update my statuses every couple days roughly.

Interview #2:
1. Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. She was very driven and stubborn and did everything her way without caring about right or wrong. She had a certain vibe to her that seemed so irresistible. I think she was the type of character that just like the river flow. She didn't really concern others in her impulsive actions she just got up and said "Lets go!" I liked her because she's not quite the character I am. I mean I try to be sometimes, I try not to care. But its not like I'm the where people don't actually care-- I have parents who do. So doing something impulsively is not something people look up at but look down upon.

2. I'm sure I've seen many actors play this character but this in particular caught my eye. They've affected me through my thoughts. Every once in a while I always think, "Hey, what would she do in this situation?" I often wish she were controlling my minds. I tend to care way to much than I need to.

3. She is the life of the party, what ever party it may be. I think we both share the same love for children. I believe we are both very loving people. She is just more charismatic than I will ever be.

4. Not so often. Tumblr. like 1 hour a day.

Interview #3:
1. Yea, of course I have people I admire. One person I admire is Kai Greene. I admire and respect them because they posses what I do not have, whether it be personality, physical appearance, money, etc. They are the people that I think if I became more like them I’d be closer to being a complete package. I see my own faults and these people that I admire are people with my faults as their strong point.

2. For the past year I’ve been striving to strengthening my faults by observing and “learning from” these characters I admire. I watch them, I try to act like them, fuse with them if you will on a non-face to face level. When I stop trying to be them maybe a part of them will un-fuse with me, I hope..

3. My day would sometimes be nothing but thinking about my meals and my work out. Kai Greene describes working out as a type of meditation, where all you concentrate on is the contraction of the muscle. During my workout or before I would try to clear my mind of all things and only focus on the contraction of the muscle. Granted I’ve been working out incorrectly for 11 months now, this one month where I’ve had time to research I’ve gained significantly more weight by following Kai Greene in terms of nutrition and working on clearing the mind before working out and before I go to sleep every night.

4. No, once a month maybe for Aim only.

Interview #4:
1. I look up to a character named Cloud Strife. His motivation to live on and fight is to find a meaning in life because his rival and coincidentally blood brother call him a puppet that is used by people. I want to find the meaning in my life as well so I look up to his way of approaching life and try to make the best out of it in any way possible.

2. Cloud has given me an alias for what I can be seen as in the virtual internet world. It allows me to say anything I want and be unaffected by what people think about me because no one would really know me. In reality I feel that my thoughts are overshadowed by his. But they do not change any of my actions.

3. With the same type of Cloud character people, they are quiet and don’t say much about themselves directly. Talking to them is very tedious but I think it’s worthwhile because I get to see what the person is really like through they’re few words better than someone who talks a lot.

4. I update my status depending on what I’m thinking about. Though sometimes I over look the fact that I even have a status, so I’d say I change around 3-4 times a week

[Part III]
It seems that of the people I interviewed, everyone has a fictional character that they look up to. And based on my own relationship with those people, and my knowledge of the characters that they said, it seems like each person is imitating that character quite well; at least, he/she is interpreting that character quite well. So with that, I think that we do create identities through the characters that we watch or read about. They give us a mold, which we use to determine how we act and interact. That is what question #3 is trying to reveal. For example, for interviewee #2, it seems that he/she loves to be with children, which is similar to his/her character. So based on his/her character, and the influence of his/her character, she chooses to interact with different people, in this case, children.

And for the last question about the status-updates, many people said it was irrelevant, but to me, status-updates are people’s ways of broadcasting themselves, in the same way that certain characters are projected through books/movies/TV. So by asking that, I could see how often people have the urge to put themselves out there. But being that I’m friends with all of these interviewees, and I have them as buddies on AIM/Facebook, I can tell that some/most of these interviewees understated the frequency of their status updates. And I’m not too certain about what this means, but I think it’s people’s denial of how hard they might try to create an identity. They want other people believe that they’re effortlessly “being themselves.” I’m still a bit unclear about how this might directly connect to my focus, but I thought that it would be interesting to see what people say, and how it compares to the actuality.


[Part IV]
I know the type of person that I want to become.