I am a huge movie buff, and therefore felt that these videos would be right up my alley. In addition to loving movies, I also love analyzing them and getting into discussions about them. After viewing “Reel Bad Arabs,” I was actively thinking about how films portray certain ethnicities. It’s not just the Arab culture that gets this treatment (though they are a popular one). Even Disney gets the heat from the media about their portrayals in their animated features. Their latest film, The Princess and the Frog underwent a huge controversy about the main character’s ethnicity even before promotionals and screenings were released.

Connecting to Stuart Hall’s lecture on representation, his main points were how the media distorts the meaning of a piece of news. Let’s take The Princess and the Frog again. The media jumped on the bandwagon of upset organizations and made the controversy about ethnicity bigger than may have been necessary. Another example that I thought very relevant in Hall’s lecture was the media’s representation of Michael Jackson. If the media had not been involved, would his alleged molestation cases have been such a big deal? Lewis Carroll was in the same situation while writing Alice in Wonderland. It was alleged that his relationship with Alice Liddell was not exactly PC. But because of the difference of media of the time periods, Michael Jackson was labeled “Wacko Jacko” and Carroll quietly refuted the allegations. Of course, in present day there is no one to refute Carroll’s allegations and therefore we make our our assumptions about his relationship with Alice.

I really enjoyed these video clips. Having previous experience with media culture in relation to film analysis, these videos just made me even more excited to pick apart the next film I see. It is unfortunate that youtube will not load on my computer to view more videos. I was looking forward to seeing what even more people thought about media culture in our present time.

I really enjoyed the read-around assignment, for the sheer fact that I got to see that others in the class had the same feelings about concepts and the readings. It gave us that all-too important feeling of being heard. As in the movie, when Julie Powell gets her first real comment, there is a certain feeling of gratification for what we’re writing.

I could really see Erin and myself making a very cool argument for visual culture related to color and the “color tests” we both mentioned in our original posts. I think it would even make for a very cool group project to kind of flesh out the dialogue we started in commenting on each other’s blogs.

I thought this was a pretty funny view on postmodernism. I really like the way he makes it accessible to everyone. I also thought it was very interesting the way he parodies postmodernism, when postmodernism is partially about parody. He uses postmodern thinking to talk about postmodernism.

He makes it accessible to people who may not know who the philosophers or even really know what postmodernism is, or know how it affects them. I really liked his approach, and how he made postmodernism seem real. In his short little skit, postmodernism is not just another “ism”, just another big idea that the everyday people don’t understand or care about. His short skit makes postmodernism a real thing for the everyday people. It almost becomes something tangible, something they can now see in other people and in the way they live their lives. I learned a lot from his skit, and how to approach postmodernism in my own culture.

That being said, coming into this chapter, I prepared myself for the same theory and boredom as McLaughlin’s class. However, that was not the case. The links that were posted to blackboard were even more helpful than the book. The book put postmodernism in terms that I could understand. I am a huge movie buff, and have seen and reviewed quite a few “avant-garde” films. From this background I can absolutely understand the connections to postmodernism in films like Blade Runner, as mentioned in the book. Every movie coming into theaters now seems to be a remake or a parody. By putting it in terms of movies, postmodernism seems much easier to understand.

Seeing things even more clearly, the section on Indie media is an obvious connection to postmodernism. Hollywood cinema is, in this example, is the modernist view of the world making Indie films the postmodernist response. Postmodernism is a response to modernism and the opinion that there can not be one universal big ‘T’ truth. Postmodernism believes, rather, that there are several small ‘t’ truths that make up our point of view in the world. This makes sense to me now that it was put in terms of Hollywood versus Indie films. Hollywood films are definitely big ‘T’ truth type stories. They play into the popular cultures of their audiences and produce a product that complies with what they want to see. Indie films shun popular culture, and make films that have a purpose other than to just entertain. They do entertain, but they also have some kind of response to a hot-button topic of the news of the day.

Now that I’ve read this interpretation of postmodernism, I wish Bob McLaughlin had been able to steer me in this direction of understanding in his class last semester. I might have understood those authors a little better if that had been the case.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnvxEPUQDPc

I found this website in a google search, and found it interesting. Then I found a youtube clip explaining the site a little further. Scotland’s government is taking progressive action in their students’ higher education by incorporating the ideas of modernity. It is an actual program of study that is geared toward helping students learn about the new and progressive teachings as they become prominent.

Having studied abroad in Scotland just this last summer, I found this very interesting. I am considering graduate school overseas, and this was helpful in getting a sense of how their curriculums are set up and how they view higher education versus the viewpoint of the States.

The program, itself, is geared toward helping students in Politics and Modern Studies approach their respective fields with fresh eyes in the new eras of modernity and postmodernity.

      We rarely, if ever, experience anything without distraction, in a “vacuum” so to speak. All around us are different sources of feedback and distractions that effect how we look/see things. Even the medium through which we look/see affects our experience. Everything we see has a frame through which we see it: televisions, framed artwork, even our eyes act as a frame for our viewing experiences. Someone wearing glasses has a frame through which they are allowed to see and look. Without that frame of glass, they would not be able to look/see. If the glasses are dirty, bent, or altered somehow, that ultimately affects the act of looking. As someone who has worn glasses since age 8, that frame has been essential in my viewing experiences growing up.

7. How is spectatorship and the gaze different from looking and/or seeing?

       Spectatorship involves the context in which the action of looking/seeing is occurring. The gaze is a sustained act of  looking. Looking and seeing sometimes imply brevity. Gaze and spectatorship go beyond the brief practice of looking/seeing to a sustained action that occurs over time.
9. What is discourse (ala Foucault)—and how does this tie to visual culture & rhetoric?

         Foucault’s definition of discourse says that the individual is an entity produced within and through the discourses and institutional practices of the Enlightenment. That is, our gaze, our looking practices, are affected by our relationships to the subject of our looking–just as it is affected by how we see it. With Foucault, it is all about the distribution of power and how it changes hands between individuals and subjects. This relates to visual culture and rhetoric because everything has a rhetoric or a discourse. And we interpret the relationships of that rhetoric/discourse every time we engage in “looking.”

Someone had mentioned in class on Wednesday that the pastel color paper reminded them of Easter. This got me thinking about the colors of Easter and why we associate pastels with the holiday and the spring season. The actual colors of spring and Easter are deep, rich colors. Spring flowers are usually bright purples, yellows, and pinks. The Easter colors are red, gold, white, and purple. And red and purple are used sparingly. I think this would be an interesting project, and would like to pursue my questions further.

Another example of color’s many meanings is flowers. With it being Valentine’s Day, there have been a ton of TV commercials for flowers and candy and jewelry (that’s a whole other story of rhetoric that I will not expound here). With flowers on the brain, there are several different interpretations for the kind of flowers you receive from another person. Yellow, is traditionally (at least in the US) thought of to symbolize friendship. Pink is said to symbolize “like” but not quite “love.” Red symbolizes passion and true love. White retains its meaning of purity. There are many other colors and flowers that could be analyzed, but even this small sample shows that color has meaning–rhetorical meaning.  A guy sends a girl yellow carnations for Valentine’s Day. If she’s bought into the aforementioned symbols of flower color, she is going to assume that “he’s just not that into you” and put him in the “friend zone.”

Color has many meanings, and should always be taken into consideration with visual design. It has a rhetoric and it has a sense of individual interpretation. It’s fun to play with color, while keeping in mind the things that you say with your creations.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBJPu1zoSnA&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrWFTN0rlD0&NR=1

After reading the chapter on text and typography, I was reminded of a youtube video a friend of mine showed me awhile ago. It’s called kinetic typhography. This is more her area of expertise since she her major is arts technology and they play around with the kind of technologies needed to create such videos. However, I think the two fields are interrelated, especially when creating this kinetic typography. The first link is to the “tutorial” of kinetic typography, and the other two links are to songs that have had the lyrics made through kientic typography to follow the song. I chose Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody and The Beatles’ Come Together.

This relates to the chapter on text in that there a re so many functions of typogrpahy and text. Not all of it is animated or what have you, but typography is still important to the creation of a document. It contributes to its rhetoric and it says something about the desginer who chose the type. Sturken and Cartwright in Practices of Looking said that we are a visual culture and we are moving away from text. I think that they are wrong. We are a visual culture, but as I think the videos of kinetic typography will show, we are merely learning how to merge text and visuals together, not replace on with the other.