Freedom is near
By Anton Rinne

Summer holiday is about to start for school students, who have been studying since August. For students throughout Finland this means more time to relax. For high school students it’s an opportunity to earn money in a summer job. The weather has been extraordinary warm and summer has started earlier than it usually does.

We interviewed a student from Lauttasaari yhteiskoulu and she was very anxious about the holiday. "I have been waiting for it since the start of the school year!" Another student told that he was going inter railing with his mates: "Finally I have the time to do this trip!"

The summer holiday used to be three months long (from the beginning of June 'til the end of August), but after Saturdays became free from school the holiday was cut to ten weeks.

MSN messenger, good or a bad thing?




Nowadays people use the messenger which is a free internet chatting software to contact other people. It has become very popular among young people. It's easy to use and with just a couple clicks you can chat with people all over the world. You just need to know the email address' of the people you want to chat with. You can even use a web camera to see and hear your friend. So it's almost a real face to face conversation. You don't have to wait someone outside in the rain if you want to meet them and you can schedule your plans beforehand. But has this changed or even destroyed our social life? 

I remember when I was a kid and I wanted to meet my friend/friends, first I tried to call them, but if I couldn't reach them I went outside to look for them. We had special meeting places where you could almost everytime see someone. Not anymore. Now the special meeting place is msn. You hardly meet your friends randomly outside, but you can always find them online. It's of course a good thing if you need to see your friends right away, but it makes the free roaming outside your home pretty useless. Why would you want to bust your ass trying to find your friends somewhere you don't even have a clue? Well it's better to use msn than a cell phone, because it's free. But when your using msn you don't really know what people are really feeling. You just see text and smileys, which don't show true emotions. Chatting is almost a blank conversation online. I doesn't give the same satisfaction as a real conversation does.

Accordingly to Nicklas Koski, a very disturbing phenomen is that pedofiles can find children easily through the msn. It's really hard to control things like these without total control of the internet. And that's dictatorship. Parents cannot control everything what their children are doing in internet. Bad things always follow good things. Microsoft was about to close msn but still to this day it hasn't.

I do think that msn is a good thing and it has made contacting to other people a lot easier and it doesn't cost. It maybe has changed our social life but life changes all the time. You can adapt or hate it, but you can't help it. And if most of your friends use it, why wouldn't you? Socializing is a very important thing and there are many ways to do it. People have did it since the dawn of our time and we will do it forever.



Sources:
http://www.nicklaskoski.fi/msn/microsoftin-paatos-sulkea-msnn-chatit/
http://images.pcworld.com/reviews/graphics/products/New_2006/05.18.06/24777_g1.jpg

My analysis on Ilta-Sanomat 17.-18.5.2008 front page

The front page is mostly dedicated to celebrities and so called "useless" information. The font type is eye catching and colourful. Ilta-Sanomat is know for it's tabloid style. It focuses on scandals, celebrities and sports.
The paper has many puffs, which focus on different celebrities and what they have done. The puffs make the news really exhiting and must to read, because of the topics.
The splash tells about a Finnish hockey player's wife's radical weight lost. There is no strapline in the front page.
There is a photo of Matti Nykänen holding on to his helmet and a text which says: "The main thing is that I won't get hurt". So that's why the picture was chosen to that article.
The choice of words of one article is pretty serious. "An Idols war!" It's about two Finnish Idols who make music and the another "idol" speaks harshly about the others music.

The front page has a lot of articles on it and it has a plenty of pictures too. It differs a lot from newspapers like Helsingin Sanomat because of it's colourful theme and attacking headlines.

This picture is from http://www.hs.fi/kuvakoosteet/maailmankuvia/
It's about an annual gun club (NAR) event. In the picture a woman is holding a 9mm handgun with her husband who's holding their baby.

I find this picture very freighting because the couple looks at the gun so hypothetically. The place seems to be full of people which indicates that people are really into guns. You can see that guns are a common thing in the US. People even bring their children to weapon shows like these ! I knew that Americans like guns and that it's easy to get one there. But I had no idea that events like these are held. No wonder that people get shot daily in the United States of America. You can only image what that baby is going to think about guns when he's older. Weapons are a big problem in America especially in the Southern states like Texas.

I feel that in a medialess society people wouldn't know what to believe in. There would be only random guessing about disasters which happened on the other side of the globe. Media also gives us a lot of activities. Such as the internet, TV and newspapers.
The only way that I could hear about world events would be through a friend. But almost certainly he would have heard it from a friend, who would have heard it from a friend's friend and so on. The news would change radically. An explosion in Cambodia would change to a story about a bank robbery in China.
If there would be a disagreement with someone about a political issue that is happening in the UK, the only thing that would help you to understand the issue, would have come through travelling.
Without media I wouldn't think about global warming or anything that is happening near my home country. I would probably just talk with my family/friends about what has happened in Finland or something like that.
Nowadays the most popular way to entertain yourself is using some type of media. The internet and TV are the ones that I use mostly. I don't listen to the radio that often and I don't read newspapers daily.
The internet has made the world a much more smaller place. You can talk to people in USA every time you want and it only takes under a second to reply. It has also helped us to understand different cultures and people.      - Anton Rinne