Week 3: Knowledge and Learning

Well, today was a very interesting class, and we learned a lot. Mark started off by talking about a couple different important ideas in Amusing Ourselves To Death about knowledge and learning. Postman's argument is that people have to work for knowledge, and that it does not just come from nothing; the same with learning. In my opinion, for the most part people have to learn in order to become knowledgeable, but I do believe in baby geniuses, and that people can really be born more knowledgable as others.

The next thing we talked about that I thought was pretty interesting was hierarchical knowledge. Hierarchical knowledge from what I learned is basically the building of one idea to the next, and the impact of one idea to the next. Original ideas are derived only from perceptions, and that is how everything begins.

A hirearchy if you didnt know is represented easily by a pyramid.

John Bergers Ways of Seeing is obviously a very controversial book, and there were some things I liked, some things I didn’t, and some things that I’d just like to talk about.

I’ll tell you the good first. All in all I thought the book was very well written, not just because Mr. Lipton said all the books we would be reading are good writing, but because I actually thought his way of persuasion and thought was smart. Whenever Berger discusses something or is getting a point across, he uses down to earth arguments, and agrees with both sides of the story in order to let the reader know that he knows what he is talking about. It is cool the way he uses his knowledge in order to persuade the reader in to thinking he knows what he is talking about, and then agreeing with him. It is sort of like scientists in the past, they simply come up with a formula that makes sense and everyone believes it.

The major thing I didn’t like about this piece is not technically the book itself but that it is from 1972. It is somewhat outdated, and although I did like some of the opinions and thoughts expressed in the book I felt like his views of women were misleading although I would completely agree with his view twenty or thirty years ago. His thoughts on the way men, “Act” and women, “Appear” seems completely agreeable if we were not in this decade, and with the way things are going women, “Act” just as much as men do, and from what I’ve seen men, “Appear” just as much as women do. Certainly some of his thoughts are feasible to this day but it seems just a bit too unbelievable.

Overall, I thought the book was VERY interesting, especially the essay about the nudes (no kidding eh?). I liked Bergers content and ways of portraying information, but like I said before some of his opinions were outdated.

Image Curation Group Task

For our first group project, my group decided to do the image curation project. Our slideshow includes images of sexy women from the past and present as well as nude photos from the past and present that each depict different meanings and visual portrayals of the media. Before writing my own blog, I took a look at Mark’s comment on one of my group members blog posting, and noticed that he did not think there was that clear of a message. I do agree with this, because really our slideshow is not that effective in portraying what we meant it to mean; skinny is sexy, and nude is crude. We established an idea that went along with sort of a feminist side of the story which agreed with women’s typical view of what they believe should be shown in the media and what should not. In my own opinion, I think our project was more a refelective of how the women and the photographers of each time period are influenced drastically to go by the standards of media in that period.

The slideshow in my subtle opinion was somewhat effective because it did show the differences and drastic changes that have gone through the way women dress and such, but it did not have a strong base argument that could have made it a lot more effective. This just goes to show you, practice makes perfect, and for next project we have more background information and more opinions to go with, making an even better, more effective project!

First Project Presentations

Today, was the first day of presentations for everyone. For this project, we were asked to create something that portrayed our understanding of the media, something that was self reflexive. As mentioned in my first post, I decided to make a newspaper article depicting three different gadgets that have or will have an impact on the media in the both the society and my life. When people began to go up to present, I seemed a little scared because although my project was creative and had a lot of though put in to it, bigger always seems better. With all the different videos, posters, and other big physical projects i felt overwhelmed with my 20 sheets of paper sitting in front of me. SO WHAT! I knew my project was good and I knew i would be fine so i continued watching and began to notice how creative some of my friends are and how some projects had such a strong point compared to others that did not seem to prove anything or be self reflexive at all. I think to most of my friends reactions as well, the two strongest projects no doubt the one with the banana on the piece of bristol board and the one that depicted different types of people in different situations including the jocks and cheerleaders as well as homosexuals and labels put on different people. Personally i thought the best one out of the two was Jeremiah's sock puppet presentation because it had such a clear message and such a creative sense to it that just engulfed me in to believing whatever the hell he said. THATS GREAT! if you can get at least one person to be completely understanding and believing of your project i think your successful. This to me was such a great presentation because it ended with a bang and at the end perfectly and very clearly re-stated the message being explained throughout his presentation.

When i got back to my residence room, i quickly Googled the word "Stereotypes" because i wanted to see what else i could find on the subject because i was so intrigued by Jeremiah's presentation. This is the first image that came up. I think it's awesome and just wanted to include it in this post. It describes his message and my feelings perfectly.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman is one of the required readings for our Mass Communication class. It is on the other hand a reading that in my honest opinion anyone in the media field should read. Sure it starts out pretty damn boring, but it does pick up the pace around the second half, and even in the dry parts there is something to be said. This sort of social criticism piece is effective in displaying the way the media is perceived by society and the way society perceives the media. This tandem arrangement works well in this piece because it gives Postman the opportunity to give support to both sides of the argument as well as stay focused on a specific point and I think because of this, it is effective writing. When Amusing Ourselves to Death was written, TV was not even that prominent yet Postman’s main argument is basically that anything that tries to take the upper hand on T.V and physical media will fail because it simply is not visual and not as appealing to the typical body. I completely agree with this, and being in the Image Arts program at Guelph Humber, a big part of my credibility comes from my images, and my feeling by going in to a stream that deals a lot with the physicality of proving points and giving opinions through photographs is my belief that the physically attractive arguments are more interesting and more appealing than writing. Sure, I love writing, and I know it is a BIG part of being successful in an image arts/media stream my main goal coming here and in the future is to prove my points through my photographs, and that’s all there is to it for me.

One part I liked in Amusing Ourselves to Death was part 5: The Peek-a-boo World. This section deals with my opinion and point exactly, talking about both photography, as well as T.V. Postman discusses how photography “shows” and how that is effective as well as how when people watch T.V they simply accept it and take it for what is; that is the simple but most easy to understand reason why T.V is so effective.

The Media Autobiography

Our first project. The first 10 percent of our final mark. Our first chance to make a good impression.

The Media Autobiography was an interesting project, which seemed valuable to the course and to our own sense of media because it allowed us to convey our own sense of media. For this project, i decided to make a magazine/newspaper article about some of my favorite forms of media: gadgets. This allowed me to go all out and explain in my opinion why i think certain gadgets and technologies are what are shaping the future for all of society. This project was worth taking my time on because i learned a lot more about the products, as well as how to somewhat assemble my own article. in terms of the writing portion, it was kind of hard writing for someone without having a bit of feedback or practice writing before doing a major assignment. On the other hand, i guess that is why we are in university, to learn how to do things for ourselves and to form our own opinions and ways of writing. I feel like i left enough time to work on this project significantly, and it did take me longer than most of my high school projects did, so it was a great introduction project for university!

All my information for the project was gathered from these great sources for technology.

www.engadget.com
www.cnet.com
www.gizmodo.com
www.macrumors.com
www.cnn.com

Kevin.

The First Session.

Well, last week was our first day of Mass Communications, and to tell you the truth it kind of scared me. There seems like a lot of projects, and within the first five minutes of Mark telling us it would be the hardest course we ever had at Guelph-Humber and the rumors i had heard before about Mark Lipton being a tough teacher, i was freaked. Although, first impressions were great, he seemed very helpful, and with his background in teaching it seemed like he will be very knowledgeable and we will learn alot over the course of these next twelve weeks. One of the main things we talked about that interested me was how with everything comes entropy (a word i learned in class) meaning all things end in chaos, and that with every intended purpose comes and unintended function which is what a lot of the media is today. With someone like the girl on Youtube who was representing South Carolina in the miss teen USA contest. This girl came up innocently to the stage and tried to answer a simple question and was obviously nervous and made a few mistakes. Her intended purpose was obviously trying to answer the question with her best abilities and relate it back to important things going on in the world like all the competors do in competitions such as this one. From there, came an unintended function which brought over 18 million users to view her making the mistake, and then all the way to her making fun of herself on tv shows just to make up for her stupidity. I think this is ridiculous but it is was media does to you, and i think its a great example of what we talked about in class! I thought i would post the video just to make it a bit easier to see what I am talking about.