Abitur-Prüfung 2012 Englisch

1. Mediation

Couchsurfing - The Revolution of Travelling in Your Living Room

Couchsufing is a website on the Internet working similarly to a search engine. People offer rooms, beds, couches etc. to sleep and others who try to find such a place nearby the offer can respond to it.The whole thing began with a student named Casey Fenton who got his hands on a very cheap flight to Iceland. Because of a lack of money and desire to pay for an accomodation he wrote an e-mail to 1500 students attending the university of Reykjavik. In this e-mail he asked each of them individually if he could sleep on a couch at their place. As quite a lot of students responded positively he had the idea to launch a website which connects people searching for a place to sleep as well as offering an option to do so. With the beginning of the new millenium the idea became real and couchsurfing.org was founded.The main aims can easily be summerized: One aspect is to have a profit-free way of travelling, but more importantly to connect people, so that they can become friends, even if it's just for a night. Besides these two points, it's a completely different way to get to know a country and its culture, as you have an inhabitant to show you his life or to guide you through his country.However where there is light, there is also shadow since using couchsurfing.org also involves some dangers.Firstly if you want to be a 'couchsurfer', you have to be ok with having your personal data available on the internet which means that you can't be anonymous. Another aspect is security because it's possible that a person 'on whose couch you would like to sleep' or the other way around, is a criminal or even worse.

2. Composition: Cartoon (Number 4)

The cartoon deals with the issue of equality and its corresponding part diversity when it comes to different groups of people.In the foreground there is a woman facing a man. Both are dressed formally, e.g. the man is wearing a suit. According to the clothing and the background which is an office as there is a desk with a computerscreen on it, the both are likely to be colleagues at work. The woman is reading something to the man which is written in a caption below the visual which says: "Our goal is to establish language that is gender-neutral, ethnic-neutral, and age-neutral, while celebrating our spirit of diversity." The painter of the visual is Glasbergen whose website is the source of it.The cartoon refers to the current trend in our society to equalize people when it comes to different genders, cultures, ages etc., e.g. exaggerated in form of a completely neutral language. The aim is to have fairer conditions for everyone while emphasizing in a positive way how special everyone is because of these aspects.But this is the irony of the visiual and the development in itself as equality and diversity are direct opposites of each other. Therefore the goal of the man and the woman and most likely the company they work for is impossible to realize. Exactly the same is true considering our society.

Hence the main intention of the cartoonist is trying to make fun of this societal trend and to highlight its idiotism.In my opinion the aim of the whole idea which is to have fairer conditions so that everyone has the same possibilities and rights is extremely necessary to archieve because it is the solution to many problems that our society is facing at the moment like e.g. racism.But I cannot argue for the way by which this should be archieved, in other words the equalization process. That is because I think that we are meant to be different from each other. It's in our nature and it's beautiful since for instance we have a great variety of cultures that can be explored. From my point of view the only way to archieve justice is not to create one culture, language etc. for all, but to establish a great sense of tolerance for each other.