This past Sunday was one of the biggest nights in pop culture—the MTV Video Music Awards. The coveted list of performers for this award show slowly grew as this event approached, and it wasn’t until the early weeks of…
Propaganda
Tomorrow’s reading is the first couple of chapters from Stanley Cunningham‘s book The Idea of Propaganda. How does the word “propaganda” act as a one of Boyer’s linguistic glosses? What does he mean by an “epistemology of propaganda”? Related to…
Tweet Causes a Change In Plans
There is always the question of how powerful social media can be; in John Smedley’s case it can be very powerful. Smedley is the online entertainment producer for Sony, and only a few days ago flight 362 was diverted due to a…
Digital Divide
For tomorrow’s lecture you will be reading “The Digital Divide, Political Participation, and Place” by Dari E. Sylvester and Adam J. McGlynn (the reading is available on Ted). While reading take note of how the authors define political/civic engagement. Do…
Wouldn’t you have hated this as a kid?
I think that all (or most) of us have experienced instances where at a younger age we would ignore our parents incoming phone calls or text messages. Regardless of the reason that we would choose to ignore them, we live…
Jihad popular in Britain–brief post
So far in class and through readings we’ve talked about globalization, the spread of propaganda–and upcoming, freedom of speech. I thought that the recent ISIS video’s link with Britain would be interesting to look into, because it is a good…
Expressing Sorrow Via Media
Robin Williams, he was an American actor and comedian. I first knew this great actor and comedian through a great movie Dead Poet Society (1989). I became a fan of Robin Williams as I watched the movie, Patch Adams (1998)…
Lecture 5.1, Free Speech
The article you are going to read for this lecture presents an interesting case study of how people perceive the threat of hate speech in the early (i.e. 2001) Internet. Here are some things to consider/pay attention to as you…
Media freedom is threatened in Syria.
Yesterday, a beheading video of American Journalist James Foley spread through social media. He had been captured by Islamic State extremist group in 2012, and they killed him and made the beheading video labeled as a “Message to America.” John…
Can Digitized Circulation Preserve Traditions?
Hafez notes that even though technology would allow media to flow across national borders, it still tends to flow within cultural groups. Since music is statistically the thing that crosses cultural borders most frequently, I am going to write about…