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The Silent Noise of Networks
Last week’s article on MySpace fans burnt me out a bit, so it was nice to read this week’s article, in comparison it was a lungful of fresh air. The article by Kate Crawford (2010) titled ‘Noise, Now: Listening to Networks’, happens to be one of the shortest readings of the semester, with only 5 or 6…
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Unravelling Myspace Character Personas
This week’s (technically last week’s) reading, titled ‘Rereading Fandom: Myspace Character personas and Narrative Identification’ by Paul Booth (2008) reads like an article carefully constructed by an android trying to dissect the nuances of human identity, due to its own lack of and longing for one. The article explores, or rather examines in excruciatingly painful…
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Sex Sells: The Male Gaze in Advertising
This week’s reading by Debra Merskin (2006, p. 202), asks the question that is clearly on everyone’s mind: ‘Where Are the Clothes?’ The text explores the sexualisation and pornographication (my spell check agrees that this is a made up word) of modern advertising, and its secret agenda to ‘maintain the sexual subordination of women’ and keep us men thinking…
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Vipassana Meditation in Prisons
This Week’s reading is an excerpt from Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish which explores the prison system and how it was born out of the security imposed upon the ‘plague-stricken town’ of the seventeenth century (Foucault, 1997, p.205). Foucault also introduces the reader to Bentham’s design of the Panopticon – a cylindrical wall of…
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Examining the Virtual Sphere
This week’s reading titled ‘The virtual sphere’ explores the concept of democracy and whether or not it exists or will exist in the internet equivalent of the offline public sphere. Papacharissi (2002, p. 11) paraphrases Habermas (1962/1989) who romanticises the public sphere in the 17th and 18th century as ‘the domain of our social life…
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Hollywood Film Spectacle
This week’s reading by Geoff King, titled ‘“Just Like a Movie”?: 9/11 and Hollywoood Spectacle’ examines the events of September 11 through a Hollywood perspective by comparing the attack on the World Trade Center to action movies such as Independence Day (1996) and The Matrix (1999). In doing this King (2005, p.47) argues that ‘there…
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Screen Narrative Traditions and Trends
This week’s reading by Stadler & McWilliam, titled Screen Narratives: Traditions and Trends, dissects the patterns and structures of film, television and game narratives. Stadler & McWilliam take the reader on a journey through the history of screen narrative, from the traditional three-act narrative to the fragmented and multi-strand narratives that have become increasingly popular…
