New Media: Gender, Culture, Technology » August 21: More Introduction

August 21: More Introduction

Announcements

Plan for Today

If we didn’t get to something last class, we might cover it here.

Asimov’s “A Cult of Ignorance”

Let’s discuss the article you read for tonight. I use this in nearly every class I teach, so Asimov’s “Cult of Ignorance” gets its own webpage.

  • Anti-intellectualism
  • Elites
  • Right to know
  • Credibility and trust
  • Reading scores
  • Drop in magazine readership
  • “true concept of democracy”

Why not trust the experts? Also, what’s wrong with highway signs having pictures instead of words?

21st Century Examples of Celebrating Ignorance

David Frike’s “The E Street Band Keep Rolling in ’09”

David Frike’s review on Canvas is a short, one-page reading I use in many classes to make various points. For our purposes, I want to focus on Fricke’s way of assembling references of other musicians to convey a representation of a Springsteen album.

Fricke’s article is a series of prepackaged ideas that carry his discussion of the Springsteen album. Phrases such as “pop stomps loaded with Beatlesque guitar jangle,” “1966-Beach Boys vocal harmonies,” and “pedal steel guitar a la Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline” (para. 3) are loaded with information–hypercompressed–and are references requiring readers to know them.

Consider audience, purpose, and situation (context):

  • Do these references mean the same thing to every reader?
  • Which readers will understand Fricke’s references? What might a reader need to know to get the most from this review?
  • Is Fricke providing us with an inside-outside perspective like cubism, or is this more linear?
    • Imagine hypertext or links to the various sounds Fricke references.
    • What else does Fricke communicate with references to other musicians?
    • By the way, I’m an English professor with a Bob Dylan poster in my office. Cliché? Why or why not?
  • New Media isn’t really new; it’s an extension of configurations and constellations of different media. Content isn’t irrelevant, but it isn’t the entire body of critique; likewise, our use of technology isn’t irrelevant to cultural studies, but it also doesn’t hold the entirety of meaning.

Good luck solving the cubism-linear question. This is what college is all about, so welcome to the first week of class.

Next Class

Try to do your Weekly Discussion Post #1 before Friday, 8/23, 11:00pm. Keep up with the reading on the syllabus. It’s light next week but will increase, so stay on top of it.