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.
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. By sunday evening, provide a posting of 2-3 paragraphs about your "take aways" from this presentation.
B. Dr. Jean-Pierre Isbouts: The Persuasive Role of Music
Television, film and other media forms are unthinkable without music. Music presents the emotional framework in which the visual information should be seen and interpreted. It also offers vital cues about the narrative arc of a story. But music can also manipulate, particularly because we are not always aware of its presence. Music easily escapes our judgmental mind, slipping below our conscious radar, skewing how we feel about what we experience.
Blog posting. By sunday evening, provide a posting of 2-3 paragraphs about your "take aways" from this presentation.
C. Jason Ohler: How Plugged In Are You?
As the ancient adage goes, fish don’t see the water. To McLuhan we are the fish and the tEcosystem - the technological ecosystem we have created out of technology, connectivity and communication - is the water. That is, we are so immersed in our technological landscape that we simply don’t notice it, until some part of it breaks, assaults our privacy, or otherwise becomes, to use McLuhan terminology, figure rather than ground. In fact, it isn’t until we notice it that we can ask questions about it. And probably one of the most important questions we can ask is: Are we so plugged in that we simply can’t unplug? And if we can’t unplug, who are we becoming as people, friends, citizens?
Recall that technology connects and disconnects. The goal of this discussion is to see more clearly the tension that exists between those two qualities as it relates to trying to balance the benefits and risks of being plugged into the tEcosystem’s all pervasive network.
Blog posting. By sunday evening, provide a posting of 2-3 paragraphs about your "take aways" from this presentation.
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
- 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.
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).
