Lieux et formes de pouvoir

I am going to talk about the notion “places and forms of power”. First of all I'd like to give a definition of the notion. First of all I'd like to give a definition of the notion. The term “Places” denotes important buildings or instituions. Power is the ability to control others, events or resources; the ability to make things happen despite obstacles, opposition.  At all times, power has been in the hands of politicians or military chiefs. But power also implies  counter-power, that is to say opposition and resistance. I will now introduce this notion with the presentation of a document seen in class. The document is Time’s person of the year cover. This issue named the silence breakers person of the year they are women who decided that enough is enough indeed, they chose to speak out against sexual harassment in society. Woman have been victims of men’s abusive attitude. We will talk about this notion through women in society. We will ask ourselves how the evolution of women in a man’s society can represent power

Women are not well represented in society. Even if more and more women are able to make themselves heard, the total constant is not there. When we think of gender inequalities, we immediately think of the wage difference for the same positions in certain companies. In classroom, we talk about the document who name “– Gender equality of the workplace” . This document is an ad for SoFi the company that coaches women who face discriminations in the workplace. Two engineers testify about their personal experience. In fact, they are 3 major problems. First, confidence. Men do not trust women and do not see them for what they are but projects on them a sexist image. For example, one explains that her boss wanted to put a coffee maker in her office so that she could make coffee for him. She had to tell him she was not his secretary but an engineer. The other says that when a new male-colleague arrived in her company the other colleagues totally ignored her and her expertise and always went to him instead of her.  The second problem is the pay gap. One reveals that when she was hired, she realized that her male-colleagues earned 10 to 20 thousand dollars more for the exact same job. Finally, promotion is another problem because money is the hardest thing to talk about especially when woman must always justify their presence. This document therefore shows that women face problems in society and are not treated as equal to men, even though they are increasingly respected.

With the case of women, we have seen that there are different types of power have different types of scale as in companies.         We will now talk about another type of power that applies to another public, that is the power of advertising. Advertisements have a great power of influence. Every day, everyone is influenced by advertising. Whether it is for everyday products, cars, food, advertising to a share of responsibility in our choices. This makes the connection with a document that we studied in class. This document is called the future of shopping. Every year children spend 40B dollars on clothes music and electronics. 700B dollars represent the money that parents spend under the influence of their children. For example, Kids choose the cars, the computers, the cell phone programs and holidays that they want parents to buy. Marketers and advertisers directly target children because they know that children will influence their parents. Indeed, marketers have studied children’s behavior and they know that parents will be more inclined to buy something when their children ask them. This document shows that pubs influence children to influence their parents. This shows the influence of advertising on all types of people. To conclude, we are going to talk about a last type of power, and especially a fairly recent one. It is the power of new technologies. Indeed, we are increasingly using new technologies on a daily basis such as smartphones, computers... All these technologies help us in life, and can sometimes help us too much. We can see this with the self driving car. In the document seen in class the reporter explains that driverless cars are safer because they prevent accidents. In fact, each year 30 000 people died in car accidents in the US and 94% of accidents are the result of driver error. For example, drivers are distracted by their smartphones. So, this reporter is in favor of self-driving cars and for him the real dilemma is how can we let so many people died? In this case, we leave the power to decide the death of others with artificial intelligence. This poses a major moral problem and we can also overlook the following question: do not leave too much power to new technologies?

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