Goals, overview. This week will begin with a “live” session during NSO in Santa Barbara. Drs. Dill, Ohler and Isbouts will each take you through a theme in critical thinking that is close to their area of interest. Each is described below.
No Felix discussion this week. There will be no Felix discussion this week, as we will be able to hold our discussions in person. However, we have set up a discussion forum in case you would like to discuss anything with your colleagues.
A. Dr. Karen Dill: Gate keeping and concepts of self in media.
Gate keeping is a term in wide use to describe the deliberate or unintentional efforts by people, organizations or structures to control the flow of information, thus limiting what the rest of us can know by virtue of the decisions they make about what we are allowed to experience. The goal of this activity is to better understand how media gate keepers operate, particularly as their activities relate to the kinds of perceptions they encourage consumers to cultivate about themselves. We will look at the 3Bs of targeted advertising - body, beauty, and belonging - and how a combination of gatekeeping and the presentation of deliberately skewed perceptions of self converge to infuse consumer society with forward momentum.
Blog posting. At the end of the session, you may choose from among the three topics raised by your faculty to post your forum response. Provide 1-2 paragraphs by Thursday night. Also, respond to three other posts from colleagues.
B. Dr. Jean-Pierre Isbouts: The Persuasive Role of Visual and Musical paradigms
Television, film and other media forms are unthinkable without visual and musical paradigms. Visual and musical cues present the emotional framework in which the story is seen and interpreted. But such paradigms can also manipulate, particularly because we are not aware of its presence. Music particularly easily escapes our judgmental mind, slipping below our conscious radar, skewing how we feel about what we experience.
At the end of the session, you may choose from among the three topics raised by your faculty to post your forum response. Provide 1-2 paragraphs by Thursday night. Also, respond to three other posts from colleagues.
C. Jason Ohler: Emerging nature of literacy
Modern literacy has always meant being able to both read and write narrative in the media forms of the day, whatever they may be. Being able to just read is not sufficient.
For centuries this has meant being able to consume and produce words through reading and writing, and to a lesser extent listening and speaking. But the world of digital expression has changed all of this in three respects:
1. New media demand new literacies. Because of inexpensive, easy-to-use, widely distributed new media tools, being literate now means being able to read and write a number of new media forms, including sound, graphics and moving images, as well as text.
2. New media coalesce into a collage. Being literate also means being able to integrate emerging new media forms into a single narrative or "media collage," such as a web page, blog or digital story. That is, students need to be able to use new media collectively, as well as individually.
3. New Media are largely participatory, social media. Digital literacy requires that students have command of the media collage within the context of the social web, often referred to as Web 2.0. The social web provides venues for individual and collaborative narrative construction and publication through blogs and services like MySpace, Google Docs, Twitter and YouTube.
Blog posting. At the end of the session, you may choose from among the three topics raised by your faculty to post your forum response. Provide 1-2 paragraphs by Thursday night. Also, respond to three other posts from colleagues.
Resources and links for the psychology of music
- Emotions Evoked by Music are Universal, from Web MD, March 2009
- Television News Music, from wikipedia
- How to Use Background Music, from eHow
- The Psychology of Music, by Jennifer Copely
- Music and Emotional Responses in the Brain, by Antonia J
- This is Your Brain on Music, by Dan Levitin
- The Social Psychology of Music, by Hargreaves and North
Resources and links for gate keeping and concepts of self in media
- Overview from the University of Twente's Media, Culture and Society web site.
- The Photoshop Effect, which features an interview with a professional photographer who talks about the prevalence of digital photo retouching in his profession and offers examples of his craft.
- Girl Power, which deconstructs a digitally retouched photo. Be sure to click on the picture until you get the menu of photo changes. Then, step through the changes to see how the picture was retouched.
- Dove's Evolution of Beauty, which shows a time lapse series of a woman's face being prepared for billboard publication.
- A 'beauty function' for a better look. This article examines software that can "automatically make you look 'better.
- Who decides who sees what on the web? by Don Dodge (1/23/06)
- No gatekeepers - just a bunch of turnstiles by Mathew Ingram (1/20/06)
- Bloggers push past the old media's gatekeepers by Tom Fiedler (Nieman Reports, Summer 2008)
- This Film Is Not Yet Rated. A documentary about the film rating industry in the U.S. There are few ways to see this: 1) Buy it from Amazon, 2) watch it through Google Video or, 3) read an interview with the film producers that explains the movie and what they discovered (a direct transcript of the movie does not appear to be available); you might also want to read Steve Carlson's review of the movie.
Porn and strong language alert. This documentary looks at film rating in the U.S., and thus shows examples of the kinds of things that are blocked. I tell you just in case you were thinking of watching it with your kids.
Resources and links about plugging in, unplugging and plugging along
- Bezos BBC interview clip about the Kindle about the symbiotic, transactional nature of the human-tool relationship
- Am I Still Here? (Doerr, Orion Magazine, 2009)
- The End of Alone (Swidely, Boston Globe, 2008)
- Meet the Life Hackers (Thompson, NY Times, 2005)
- Personal confessions on Tyra Banks
* Aristotle quote from Barker's 1948 translation of Politics (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1948), as cited in A Brief History of Citizenship, by Derek Heater (New York University Press, 2004). "woman-hugging-book" image used with permission of its creator, Avi Abrams.
