Oscar Wilde Essays - Oscar Wilde, Jane Wilde, Oscar,

Oscar Wilde Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin Ireland on October 16, 1854. He is one of the most talented and most controversial writers of his time. He was well known for his wit, flamboyance, and creative genius and with his little dramatic training showing his natural talent for stage and theatre. He is termed a martyr by some and may be the first true self-publicist and was known for his style of dress and odd behavior. Wilde, 1882 His Father, William Wilde, was a highly accredited doctor and his mother, Jane Francesca Elgee, was a writer of revolutionary poems. Oscar had a brother William Charles Kingsbury along with his father's three illegitimate children, Henry, Emily, and Mary. His sister, Isola Emily Francesca died in 1867 at only ten years of age from a sudden fever, greatly affecting Oscar and his family. He kept a lock of her hair in an envelope and later wrote the poem ?Requiescat' in her memory. Oscar and his brother William both attended the Protora Royal School at Enniskillen. He had little in common with the other children. He disliked games and took more interest in flowers and sunsets. He was extremely passionate about anything that had to do with ancient Greece and with Classics. Wilde during school years In 1871, he was awarded a Royal School Scholarship to Trinity College in Dublin and received many awards and earned the highest honor the college offered to an undergraduate, the Foundation Scholarship. In 1874, he also won the College's Berkley Gold Medal for Greek and was awarded a Demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford. After graduating from Oxford, Oscar moved to London with his friend Frank Miles, a well-known portrait painter of the time. In 1878 his poem Ravenna was published, for which he won the Newdigate poetry prize. In 1881, he published his first collection of poetry ?Poems', which was well liked by critics. In late 1881, Oscar left to travel across the United States and deliver a series of lectures on ? the aesthetics?, the belief that to create a sense of beauty was more important than anything else. The trip was only planned to last four months but instead lasted nearly a year with Oscar giving nearly three times as many lectures as planned. He met Henry Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Walt Whitman, on which he made a good impression. During this time he arranged for his play Vera to be staged in New York. The play was cancelled during rehearsal due to it concerning Nihilism in Russia which was delicate subject matter at the time and in New York it closed after only a week. Oscar was married on May 29, 1884 to Constance Lloyd and they had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan. He was extraordinarily fond of his children, although he did not spend much time with them Constance with son Cyril In 1887, Oscar accepted a position at a magazine called The Woman's World which he was to help revitalize, but quit in 1889. He wrote about the folklore and superstition of Ireland. He published the prose The Happy Prince and Other Tales in 1888, which he wrote for his sons. He wrote the essay The Decay of Lying in 1889. Oscar's first play Dorian Gray Opened in 1890 and was later expanded and published as a book The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891. The story is about moral decadence and is distinguished for its brilliance. Dorian, a man of extraordinary beauty is painted by a friend and he wishes he remain as in the portrait and that it bear his sins. Dorian goes on to lead a wicked life and kills himself in the end. The process of corruption in the story is fully described and the shocking conclusion commits to a moral stand against self-debasement. Its subject of criminal deviance and lack of morality caused public outrage and the play made very little money. In 1891 two of his prose were published The House of Pomegranates, which he also wrote for his sons and Lard Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories. Over the next few years many of Oscar's plays were produced. Salome was a drama about obsessive passion written in

The Central Tenets of Positivism and Effects on Social Research and Methodology †Sociology Research Paper

The Central Tenets of Positivism and Effects on Social Research and Methodology – Sociology Research Paper Free Online Research Papers The Central Tenets of Positivism and Effects on Social Research and Methodology Sociology Research Paper Becoming a sociologist involves learning techniques and modes of analysis through which the merits of various competing versions of reality can be assessed. Most people have knowledge of the society of which they are a member, but their personal experience is insignificant when compared with the total experience of all members of that society. To gain more general knowledge of society, sociologists have developed or adopted a variety of methods of information collection and analysis. Sociological research is often differentiated on the basis that it is either quantitative or qualitative (Giddens). Quantitative research involves the construction of numerical information on large groups of people through means such as the census. Qualitative research involves the collection of more detailed and descriptive information on smaller groups of people. The method chosen for a research project may depend on the subject matter of the research, the aims of the sociologist within that research project, and on that sociologists underlying philosophy of knowledge or epistemology. Quantitative and Qualitative research methods are often associated with positivist and interpretive philosophies. Particular methodologies may also be associated with particular social theories. Research methods is therefore not a technical exercise involv ing the application of statistics or techniques of interviewing and observation, it also involves the understanding of different theories of knowledge and philosophical standpoints. These philosophical standpoints first came to the fore front in the early nineteenth century when sociology first developed. At this point in history, industrialisation was resulting in massive social changes, along with these social changes came intellectual changes, during which science was becoming a lot more influential with philosophers and professionals. Science appeared to be capable of producing objective knowledge that could be used to solve human problems. Therefore, many early sociologists chose to turn to science for methodology on which to base their subject. Emile Durkheim argued that sociologists should apply the methodologies of the natural sciences such as physics to the study of human beings, seeing the scientific method as the only valid and reliable source of knowledge. This implies that scientific sociological research produces collection of facts, and that sociologists should aim at establishing general laws describing human behaviour from which predictions can be made. This perspective is known as positivism and often underpins quantitative research methods. Positivist sociology originated with the work of Auguste Comte (1798-1857), he believed that the social world closely resembled the natural physical world. Comte believed that there was a hierarchy of scientific subjects with sociology at the pinnacle of that hierarchy. He believed that both the social and natural world were made up of objective facts which were independent of individuals and waiting to be discovered. He believed that behaviour in both the natural and social world was governed by external laws, he argued that sociology could be called a ‘science of society’, engaged in discovering the social laws governing human behaviour. â€Å"Comte was confident that scientific knowledge about society could be accumulated and used to improve human existence, so that society could be run rationally without religion or superstition getting in the way of progress†. (Haralambos) Bryman (1988) describes positivism as having five main features: Methodological naturalism or the belief that social research should employ the methods of the natural sciences. Empiricism, or the belief that knowledge can be gained only from observable phenomena. Inductivism or the belief that theory reflects an accumulation of verified facts expressed as laws. Deductivism or the process of generating hypotheses from theory and subjecting them to empirical testing in order to confirm or undermine that theory. Objectivity, or the belief that valid knowledge is obtained when scientists do not allow their personal values to intrude on their research. The central tenets of positivism as they appeared in twentieth century philosophy of science firstly include the belief that the scientific study of society should be confined to collecting information about phenomena which can be objectively observed and classified, this relates to Bryman and his feature of objectivity. Comte argued that sociologists should not be concerned with the internal meanings, motives and emotions of individuals, because, these mental states only exist in the person’s consciousness. Therefore they cannot be observed and measured in any objective way. Durkheim also agreed that sociologists should confine themselves to studying social facts, he claims, â€Å"Consider social facts as things†. In other words, the facts of the social world for example, institutions, belief systems and customs – they should all be considered as things in the same way as the objects and events of the natural world. Another aspect of positivism concerns the use of statistical data, as many positivists believed it was possible to classify the social world in an objective way, therefore it was then possible to count sets of observable social facts and so produce statistics. An example of this would be Durkheim’s study of suicide; he collected data on social facts such as the suicide rate and the membership of different religions in order to determine if there was a correlation between the two. After this he was able to produce statistics, determining the correlation that more people from the Protestant religion committed suicide. This method of looking for and establishing correlations between social facts is another aspect of early positivism. An example of this, again using Durkheim’s study of suicide, would be the correlation that married people were more prone to suicide than those who were single. However, he also found that married women who had no children ended up with a high suicide rate. The search for causal connections is a central tenet of positivism; this is when there is a strong correlation between two or more types of social phenomena. A positivist might then believe that one of these phenomena was causing the other to take place. However, it has been found that this is not always the case. Robert Merton (1968) believes there is a correlation between a person being working class therefore there being a high chance of that person being convicted of a crime. This is not always the case as there are other possibilities including the criminal could be of middle class origin but their conviction of crime causes them to be downward socially mobile causing lack of employment and therefore becoming working class. In order to overcome the problem of spurious correlation, Durkheim devised a technique known as multivariate analysis. This involves trying to isolate the effect of a particular independent variable upon the dependant variables. The dependant variable is the ‘thing’ that is caused, for example, crime. The independent variable is the factors that cause the dependant variable, for example, gender. Quantitative researchers can therefore analyse the relative importance of many different variables. Durkheim for example, checked whether or not Protestantism was associated with a high suicide rate regardless of nationality by examining suicide rates in a range of countries. Positivists believe that multivariate analysis can establish causal connections between two or more variables. If these findings are checked in a variety of contexts for example, in different societies at different times, then the researchers can be confident that they have gained the ultimate goal of positivism: a law of human behaviour. Auguste Comte believed he had discovered a law that all human societies passed through three stages, the theological, the metaphysical and the positive. In the first humans believed that events were caused by the actions of gods, in the second, events were held to be caused by abstract forces, but in the third scientific rationality triumphed so that scientific laws formed the basis of explanation. These various tenets of positivism have had many various implications for social research and the researchers. It has been argued that the positivist approach has highlighted the concept of value freedom. This is the view that sociology can and should conduct research according to the dictates of science; excluding any influence of the researchers own values. This in turn will make the research more reliable. However, in the social sciences we all tend to have beliefs and commitments in relation to whatever we are studying and researching. It can be said to be impossible to exclude all biases introduced into a researchers work, this in turn influencing the research process. Another implication of positivism is that the sociological positivist insists that the methods and techniques applied in research should be objective. This is when the knowledge researchers’ gain is claimed to meet criteria of validity and reliability, therefore making the research free of bias. Even if the bias does occur, sociological studies are often closely scrutinised and criticised and then repeated by different members of the scientific community, therefore bias is often eliminated in the long run. Due to positivists arguing that official statistics are objective, easily quantified and reliable, many researchers will now employ statistics in their research as they are easy to use and easy to read. Positivists also argue that there is little opportunity for error or subjectivity to affect the truth of hard data such as the birth and death statistics. One of Bryman’s features of positivism – deductivism – is also essential for research as the generating of hypotheses and the empirical testing of hypotheses will help the researcher in the long run with the problem of bias again as I stated above making the research more reliable. A method popular with positivists who are collecting data for their research is the social survey as it gathers quantifia ble data, it is regarded as objective and reliable – both of which are essential for researchers. Although positivism has had many implications for social research, it has also been strongly criticised. An example of this would be that although sociological researchers profit from being able to pose questions directly to those they are studying – human beings. On the other hand, people who know their activities are being scrutinised, frequently will not behave in the same way as they do normally. Foe example, when individuals answer questionnaires, they may consciously or unconsciously give a view of themselves which differs from their usual attitudes. Individuals may even try to assist the researcher by giving the responses they believe he or she wants. The main view of positivism is that laws of human behaviour can be discovered by the collection of objective facts about the social world in statistical form by careful analysis of these facts and by repeated checking of the findings in a series of contexts. From this point of view, humans have little or no choice ab out how they behave, what takes place in their consciousness is held to be irrelevant since external forces govern human behaviour; people react to stimuli in the environment in a predictable and consistent way. Therefore positivists are implying that humans react directly to a stimulus without attaching a meaning to it first. â€Å"It is this implication of the positivist approach that has attracted the strongest criticism†. (Haralambos). To conclude this assignment I believe that the positivist approach within sociology is as useful today within research as it was back at the end of the nineteenth, beginning of the twentieth century. Its many tenets are still widely used throughout the research world including statistical data, correlation and causation. Although there are also other philosophical standpoints within sociology, I believe that the positivist belief that social facts make individuals behave in a particular way is the most relevant to researchers today as it gives the researcher an opportunity to have his or her own beliefs and values regardless of what their customs and practices are. REFERANCES Bryman, A (1988) Quantity and Quality in Social Research. Routledge, London. Giddens, A (1993) Sociology Second Edition. Polity Press, London. Haralambos, M Holbourn, M (1995) Sociology. Harper Collins, London. Merton, R (1968) Social Theory and Social Structure. The Free Press, New York. Research Papers on The Central Tenets of Positivism and Effects on Social Research and Methodology - Sociology Research PaperInfluences of Socio-Economic Status of Married MalesResearch Process Part OneAnalysis Of A Cosmetics AdvertisementEffects of Television Violence on ChildrenThree Concepts of PsychodynamicAnalysis of Ebay Expanding into AsiaThe Relationship Between Delinquency and Drug UseBionic Assembly System: A New Concept of SelfRelationship between Media Coverage and Social andPETSTEL analysis of India

Global Marketing Communication Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Global Marketing Communication - Essay Example The project was built with a support from the Australian filmmaker, Darius Devas. The inclusion of Devas was important as he had already travelled to Goa, India. He was allowed to document the reunion of his old friends who were there as part of Goa hippy Mecca in the 1970s. The documentary was built by collecting response from the significant personalities which were key in the entire story. At the first stage, the Dubs has come up with 13 video vignettes on the platform of Facebook. This was done on a regular basis throughout the months of March and April, 2010. The platform was chosen in the wake of customers’ growing attraction towards the online content. The project was an effort by the leading broadcast medium SBS, Freehand Television, Screen Australia and Screen NSW. The strategy was implemented in two stages. At the first stage, the Facebook Group was considered to attract the audiences. At the later stage, the Facebook fan page was included to communicate with the tar get audiences. The project started off with the introduction of ‘Goa Hippy Tribe’, an online community to connect the relevant people and communities. The community page put its effort to be linked and associated with the audience group who is passionate about the group and emotionally tied up with the Goa hippy community. The videos were related to certain themes like drug subculture, young age spirituality and trance music which can be associated with the Goa. Furthermore, the Dubs also used other media platforms like YouTube and Flickr to push its product to additional audiences. The project was a success as there was audience engagement in the making of this documentary TV series. As the people felt that they were actually involved in the making of the process. The loyalty was enormous with the feel of joint ownership. The audience base also increased through word of mouth communication. At the end stage, after the documentary was done, a fan page was created to rea ch out to a larger audience group. Through the group and fan page, the project was able to reach out to 9000 fans without spending a dollar on traditional marketing or advertising on air. Traditionally in a documentary film, there is enough research involved with a considerable number of interview processes. These are never released to the audiences (Tay, 2010). However, as those were released and were used to shape up the documentary films, people felt connected to the making process of the same leading to an emotional feeling and passion for the documentary series. Facebook also allowed the audience sot take part in the group discussion for this project leading to fetching a considerable attraction from its fans. This feeling of involvement was possible through Facebook and led to the success of the documentary series. Link between the Case and Relevant Theories Communication is one unique activity which establishes the relationship. The communication has been central to the integ rative marketing process. Dunca and Moriaty have come up with a communication based marketing model to manage the relationships. They developed a model displaying the significance of communication in the foundation of the marketing efforts. The communication seems to be one of the most significant elements of the marketing leading to the establishment of the brand relationships with