Anglais oral

Lieux et formes de pouvoir

I am going to talk about places and forms of power. First of all I would like to give a definition of this notion : Power is the ability to control others, events, or resources and places can also be a country or a state, which is powerful enough to influence events throughout the world.

We can therefore ask ourselves : Is Internet a place and form of power ?

Indeed, Internet is a powerful, efficient and useful tool wich helps people communicate easily. So first we’ll see that Internet is a useful place of power, but we’ll see in a second time that Internet could be a dangerous form of power.

To illustrate this, I have chosen some documents : for the first part, I will talk about the Ice bucket challenge, and a video called “the Internet for the blind”.

For the second part, I have chosen to talk about one video : “the Internet is a bad thing”, and about a document called “does social media impact on body image?

The first document is about the ice bucket challenge, a famous challenge created for raising money all around the world for funding research and helping people touched by the ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis). The goal of this challenge is to dump a bucket of ice water on one’s head. It was a viral trend and even George W Bush took part in this challenge.

The second document is a video called “the internet for the blind” and it’s about a blind man who’s been helped on web pages by a synthetic voice. It shows that the disability rights apply also to the Internet. These 2 documents are interesting because they show that internet can be a good way to help people around the world.

But Internet is a dangerous form of power too. The video called “the Internet is a bad thing” shows it perfectly. Indeed, in this video we can see all the bad aspects of the Internet : identity theft, open market where we can buy what we want, and a place where we can fulfil the darkest desires. This advertisement warns us about the bad things we can do on the Internet. This video proves that Internet isn’t necessarily a useful tool.

The second document is an article written by Philippa Roxby, a reporter from BBC news.

It is about the impact of the internet on people’s perception of their body and their look.

It shows that people can underestimate themselves because of Internet.

Finally, we can tell that Internet is a form of power who can be useful but it’s a dangerous place too. We can relate these documents to the idea of progress because Internet allows, for example, to talk to people from around the world thanks to social networks.

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