40 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2019
    1. The power of imperializing knowledge works ... by both oppression and repres-sion. It oppresses first by "othering" or exoticizing its object of knowledge, and thus producing it as the terrain for imperialization.

      Much of the news that was available was about white middle class, and advertisements also for white middle class. This only recently has started to change in the United States to try and be more egalitarian.

    2. Realism, as a mode of representation, is particularly characteristic of Western cultures and, therefore, in the modern world, of capitalism. It is as powerful and attractive as it is because it grounds our cultural identity in external reality: by making "us" seem real it turns who we think we are into who we "really" are.

      Is realism mostly just a characteristic of Western cultures or is this something that can be found in most cultures? Is realism more prevalent in America versus Europe?

    3. One of the key representational strategies is "othering." The "other" is always a product of representation and, as such, whatever form it may be given, always applies the discursive and material power of the representing social order upon that part of the world it has made into its other.

      Even labeling objects or people as "other" dehumanizes them, which allows people to disassociate from the object or person. Also puts it in to dominate and submissive roles that create power struggles. If you look at wars, we label who ever we are fighting against as the other, they are doing wrong. We forget that that other is people.

    4. Any attempt to hear and learn from what another culture wishes to say works towards equalizing power relations, particularly when what is said may not be what the listener wishes to hear. Listening is the opposite of representation, which is why the first act of the power-bloc on rising in the morning is to insert its ear plugs. A culture of representation, therefore, is not limited to what is often thought of

      With the increasing ability to be able to hear and listen about other cultures, is our world working towards equalizing power relations or has this access created more issues and has people purposefully not listening?

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  2. Nov 2019
    1. A recent study of four network newsmagazines found that over one-half of all stories focused on lifestyle, human interest, and celebrity news. Just 8 percent of reports were about politics, economics, social wel-fare and education.2

      This has to be even more relevant today, because even our politics have become about drama and celebrities. Everything focuses on lifestyle, human interest, and celebrity news instead of real issues in the world.

    2. he second wave of Reali-TV programming, ushered in by the ratings success of the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire' in 1999 and Sur-vivor in 2000

      These two shows I believe preformed very well, because they were shows that regular people participated in, and something the audience watching had the chance in trying. With money in the end being a goal that everyone wants. This makes the audience picture themselves in those people shows saying that they could do it.

    3. In addition, the delay of the season gave producers and programmers ·the impetus to develop future shows that did not depend on writing talent

      This all sounds very similar towards YouTube today. The budgets are a lot lower, follows people around their daily lives, with some exaggeration of parts of their lives, no need for writers. YouTube is kinda a new form of reality television

    4. Producers now were forced to deficit-finance their programs and cross their fingers in hopes the show would survive three network seasons, providing enough episodes for domestic and foreign syndication and a chance to recoup their initial investments.

      Reality television was truly forced on to become a show because of the cutback and rising costs. I wonder if those financial problems and tax laws never came into play would reality television still have happened

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    1. Boundaries between fact and fiction were blurring as “tidal waves of entertainment” flooded into “discursive zones previously reserved for education, informa-tion and enlightenment,” and real people performed their identities and differences within a popular “theater of intimacy.”

      No one cares if lines between fact and fiction are blurred, the audience likes to believe that these are how reality television stars always act, no matter how extreme they get. The audience gets this feeling that they are friends or at least apart of these peoples lives. They get so invested into the reality television it almost becomes apart of their life.

    2. Many of these reality productions have been charged with embellishing the truth for entertainment value, and downplaying the political dimensions of differ-ence and the inequalities upon which it often rests

      As much as many television shows do show various sub-cultures that tend to be different from the middle class norm. Much of what is aired is either the very low class white life or very high class life. There has not been a lot of actual diversity on television.

    3. As with other reality shows, the participants are enlisted to “just be themselves, only more so,” a direc-tive that media sociologist Laura Grindstaff describes as a self-conscious performance of class (and other social differences) steeped in clichés cir-culating within the industry and society at large (2011a, 2014). While real people are clearly involved, they are enlisted to play loosely scripted “roles” designed to entertain audiences.

      Reality television is a way to emphasize ideologies that people like to watch, because it is either something very different from what you know or is something you can kinda of relate to. With the each show brings different forms of stereotypes like white trash, rich life, etc.

    4. While this claim may be a stretch, TLC programming does present an alternative to the aspirational identities and opportunities for self-actualization emphasized by other lifestyle channels. Many TLC programs combine the conventions of comedy and soap opera

      Reality television might do so well because it's the mixture of comedy, soap opera and based on peoples real lives. This can draw in multiple platforms of people whether they watch it for the comedy or the drama. Or they just like the idea that the people on television are real people and these are their personalities. Which might make people relate to them easier.

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    1. hey covered only major disasters abroad, yet turned down reports for being too depressing. We could see rising threats and coherent patterns pointing to catastrophe, and we saw the human consequences; all of it was simply waved away for incomprehensible reasons. Bad news was still real news sometimes, but more and more often it wasn't. The minute-by-minute pursuit of ratings by homebound executives induced in them a kind of hypnotized insularity that mystified us: We thought they lived in a fantasy world, and they thought the same of us

      Everything today is made for ratings, the views, just getting the most attention from the mass people. Which many people providing the information noticed that people don't actually want to hear the real depressing things happening in the world. They want something quick and something that doesn't take a lot of thought.

    2. The post-Soviet years coincided with the Clinton-Gore era, in which the president's sex life and domestic celebrity gossip in general became accepted as the legitimate currency of headlines. In the new media environment of cable, satellite, and the Internet, gossip and entertainment journalism expanded massively as a revenue-earning genre-a situation that lasted into the Afghan and Iraqi invasions,

      With elections coming up the sad thing is all that gets provided now is the candidates bashing each other on how horrible the other person is, it's not on how the actual candidate will help our country or what they will try to change our country. The media covers the gossip and it has turned into a form of reality television, and people pick the future president from that not what their qualifications are or the people trying to for the betterment of this country.

    3. 'V'e\1, a potential conflict at the heart of Europe, the first since World War n, could definitely affect American vital interests. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of European history knew that Balkan wars inevitably pulled in major powers;

      I think that many people in America forget how intertwined we are with other countries. Being allies with other countries means if they have a war we are bond to be a part of it as well. That anything happening in other parts of the world does effect us. So he has such a large point that he needed to report what was happening.

    4. At that time, America's leaders had so successfully united the country that the news media never ques-tioned the war itself or the actions of our leaders in waging it.

      America also is known to be the one that came in and ended the war, when in reality we came so late into the war and were so oblivious to the actually actions happening in the war. But this added to America's belief that they are the strongest world power that saves everyone. People didn't question because they liked the idea of being the saviors of the war.

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    1. The FCC increased the number of stations the networks can own, and dropped the requirement for public service broad-casting. Network news shows were now free to cut corners and chase ratings to their heart's content.

      Yes news stations get more choice in the subjects that they air, but also event he various serious topics they don't spend a long time on. I had a homework assignment once and we had to time the longest segment on the news. The longest anyone got in the entire class was 3 minutes. No one goes in to depth about the serious topics it goes from talking about a mass shooting to look at the puppies within seconds.

    2. Get angry, be skeptical, and don't let these reasons convince you that nothing can be done. Here they are:

      Do you guys think that today more people and broadcasting networks try to be more aware and present with the worlds happenings or are we just becoming more unaware and less critical? To me it's a mixture of both and a very slow moving process of gaining more knowledge of the world and carrying about what's happening.

    3. yell at people and they don't hear you." The only people he met who seemed the least concerned about the war were the officers he met at the War Department when he went to Wash-ington to do a profile of General George ~brshall.

      If you even read or look into what the American soldiers who fought in World War II thought about what was happening its astonishing. There is a lot of stories from the American soldiers saying that they had no clue how bad it was until they actually found the camps. That when they arrived at the camps that was the first time they found out about the mass enslavement and genocide of these people. So even the American soldiers who were in the war had been blind to it until they found the camps which was way later in the war then the 1940s.

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    1. Now one would want rather to stress the way in which the skin repels the city outside, a repulsion for which we have in those ret1ector sunglasses which make it impossible for your interlocutor tu see your own eyes and thereby achieve a certain aggressivity toward and power over the Other. In a similar way, t hf) glass skin achieves a peculiar and placeless dissociation of the Bon-aventure from its neighborhood: it is not even an exterior, inasrnucb as ~,, ~,'),,,7,,,y.,"-"' ,, .,,,"'~'~'{ .. , .. \':'':.)~ .. ::.a·. t) .. t: :~'le::: ... :,.: .. :.: : hot e I

      The walker art center would be a very similar example. Not allowing the people on the outside to look in, but a ls reflecting the objects as well as distorting them.This building makes the viewer curious to what is inside such a unique building, and really shows the contemporary style that it was created from, which directly reflects what the inside is made up of which is contemporary art.

    2. If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced ca.p1~~!':.?-' ... ~,,~.\d,,.h, .... ,c"'··'''·'''··'····.:. ... ::: .. : .. : .. :n.ow a field of stylistic and discursiv.e.het-nomic strategies which constrain our existences.

      I think that this is very significant because the United Sates has dominated with spreading styles, ways to behave, and controlled social media. The United States has tried to control the existence of people around the world. For example a lot of the celebrities that influence us in the United States also have reached all parts of the world and influence others as well. Going to other countries you can see the effects the United States has had on them, which is crazy.

    3. Edward Munch's painting The Scream is, of course, a canonical expression o[ the great modernist thematics of alienation. anomie, solitude, social fragmentation. and isolation, a virtually progmmmatic emblem of what used to be called the age of anxiety.

      Edvard Munch's artwork really was bout embodying emotions, and trying to show the internalized emotions in the art work. He purposefully would use the hardest moments in his life and create paintings out of them. The scream he was on a dock and began to have a panic attack he then created the scream out of what he thought that moment he felt. He also did a lot of paintings with the death of his sister. He wanted to show emotion.

    4. What has not b()tm taken into account by this view, however, is the social position of the older modernism, or better still, its passionate repudiation by an older Victorian and post-Victorian bourgeoisie for whom its forms and ethos are received as beino variously ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral. subversive, an<l generally "antisocial."

      Another great era to be looked at for postmodernism would be the Weimar republic. The expressionist artists really took advantage of the time because it was during the roaring 1920s and when Hitler was on the rise so many would use the party life and political things going on in Weimar at the time in their art and over exaggerated. If you look at the art it almost seems as if it is the 1920s versions of memes with a lot of opinions inserted into the art.

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  3. Oct 2019
    1. he point is not that Bubbles is a more sentimental and hopeful versionof Gary and therefore thatThe Wire’s“artistic freedom” softens the socialrealism of its realist ethnography. Such an argument implies that only anunredeemably bleak picture of the multiple sites of the city are the trueones, as if this “happy ending” negates the realism of the rest. This wouldbe a definition of realism that puts things as they are in irrevocable oppo-sition to things as we might want them to be and that sees melodrama asdiametrically opposed to realism.1

      People are so obsessed with their favorite characters getting a happy ending they don't care it it sways from reality. Most people would rather read or watch something that ends happy and I think that's because they want their lives to be happy. If they see these people with hard lives end well than maybe they have a chance as well. This also makes the story very predictable to how it will end.

    2. therehad never been a film or a television series that had given equal time toboth sides of the law and portrayed them comparatively as systems inthemselves. And not even the novelClockershad managed to capture thesystematic day-to-day workings of law enforcement and law breaking overa sustained period of time

      I think that it is so important to give the criminal side to the story as well, because the criminal is turned into this horrible person all the time in television series. When in reality the criminal has a story of how they ended up there and it might not have really been their choice to do the crimes. I think spending time with both the cops and the criminal you can get a full picture and actually have a more realistic opinion of the situation.

    3. “I am looking for a different, less stereotyped, and moresignificant place for the reception of ethnographically produced knowl-edge in a variety of academic and nonacademic forms...within a multi-sited research imaginary, tracing and describing the connections andrelationships among sites previously thought incommensurate is ethnog-raphy’s way of making arguments and providing its own contexts of sig-nificance”

      To me every place is significant and all has roles on the relationships between sites. There is no place that doesn't have a connection to another. Everything has it roles, and every place is stereotyped.

    4. Thismethod maps a more complex thread of interconnected cultural processesof an evolving and related world system (E,p.82). Through the discoveryof these relations, the ethnographer attempts to “bring these multiple site

      To be able to investigate anything you start with micro-systems and see if you can find links to larger macro-systems or mesosystems. Starting off smaller is always easier to start finding themes in the kind of culture they are looking at. In this case it was the police world and criminals world in this specific area.

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    1. like an accent that only black people would understand, you know. Just like there's slang that white people understand, there's slang that black people understand.

      That slang actually is referred to as a type of language in English. The technical term is African American English (AAE). It's a style in how the vernacular is produced by African American's that white people don't use. It's just like there is American English, and British English. It is just a form in which English is used.

    2. Furthermore, these statements were made with an understanding that this had not happened before on television. The pleasure of black respondents and their level of emotional bonding with the Huxtables reveal not just the creative ability of the show's writers but also the frustration that black Americans had felt witli past portrayals of blacks.

      A large appeal to the show was that it was one of the first shows to actually show African American life that white people hadn't created, that wasn't this fake idea of black people all being criminals of some kind, it was showing the real life of black people just having families, and that being a core value in their lives. That's what attracted a lot of black people to the show. Like this article says they could actually relate to how they were being represented on television.

    3. The result of such bonding and identification is to grant the Huxtables a privileged place in viewers' lives in terms of how viewers saw themselves. Many viewers remarked that the Huxtables reminded them of their own families so that watching the show is like 'holding up a mirror to a pleasant time gone by. We are watching our own past with more than a hint of nostalgia.

      I think that show being focused around family makes many people have that nostalgia when watching it. But since the family seems so perfect and happy all the time even when dealing with family troubles it shows people what they want there family to be like, they wish that their family would be that happy and perfect.

    4. These comments suggest that the series does more than pleasantly wash over its viewers; it touches them, creating feelings of involvement and intimacy. This level of identification is important because it suggests that the series has a more profound influence than a show that is passively consumed and subsequently forgotten.

      The show did a good job attracting audience by making it feel very relevant to everyday lives. The influence of this show even affected how people parented, and even many famous comedians like Eddie Murphy said that Bill Cosby was a big influence to him as a comedian, purely on the fact that he was a African American male that made it. The show did have a lot of impact on people's lives.

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    1. This response is, in one sense, quite remarkable: TV images are not only trusted; they are given more c~edence than real-life experience. The respondent does attempt to legitimate her evaluation by referring to lawyers "on the news" (i.e., real lawyers) rather than in drama series like LA Law, Equal Justice, or The Cosby Show.

      It's crazy that people will put so much trust in television series to be the truth. That whatever is presented is reality. I guess people assume that they base the characters and the situations on real life things, and so they have trust in the show. And like the text says some people see these characters more than their families and friends. So something you see everyday would be something you would think is dependable and reliable for the truth of how things are.

    2. The reality of television, in other words, does not seem to rest upon the reality of the viewers' own environment

      I think that this is super relevant with YouTube becoming this platform that pretty much is television. That you can access parts of so many different people's lives and relate to them, and feel as though you know them. You may not have anything in common with them but you feels as though you do and that they are your friend. It's this form of reality television that is growing more and more popular by the day.

    3. V news, as a form of communication, is thus deeply flawed; but we are more concerned here with how it contrasts with TV fiction. Though the pictures of the w(')rld painted by news programs often seem remote, the visions conjured up by sitcoms, soaps, and drama series intrude far more intimately into our live

      The news is partially flawed, because they only spend short intervals on any subject. I t could be about a very serious subject like a murder, but the most time they will spend on it is a couple minutes. To me many people can't get invested in something when so little time is spent on each section. You can now just look up the news on your phone and get more outlets, opinions, and the ability to pick what news you read or watch.

    4. :~~~r;•~~~;!~~~~~~~~~~~nt~~y~~~l~~~b-r~~ffii&~fi~~these di~IJl'gte~-~~~~~!.:atli.."~e"ss'.lg~i''tr2.tt¥~·~~~~~:~·~~tf''~~~~~1¥Fl!f~1: inco-li~ . . ··~"sense and 'honsense:'''A''det:a:iled ela "iofi''at'~imet'Ififr;4;d~f~~~§tt~ge!rr~''tlfaf''~t1l~'*'i'i1orE'''teft!'v1'sion we "-tch, the more we are able to hold contradictory ideas simultaneously,

      Product placement is such a large part of movies and television that we are unknowing being sold products constantly. It easy extremely hard to find any new television shows and movies that don't have product placements. This is dangerous because the audience is being sold ideas without even realizing it. They can use this with political views, and this could sway how you think. Television having the power to change you beliefs unknowingly is a very scary thing.

    5. These are not attitudes solidly constructed on reason; they are ideas built by association. This mode of thinking has been a prominent part of culture in the United States ever since the advertising industry discovered that appeals based upon association were much more effective than appeals based upon providing consumers with rational information about products.

      This is prominent in our society, because the reason advertisers try and have celebrities be apart of their ad and endorse their products is because the audience associates being rich, famous, and beautiful with whatever product. The audience than thinks that this product would help them achieve what they have. Thus the association helps sell the product.

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    1. Mrican Americans by the presence of a visiting friend from Trinidad, Dr. Harman. During the show, Cliff teases his friend about his accent, symbolizing both the unities and differences between the two black cultures.

      Teasing about the friends accent is subtly telling the audience that having an accent is funny. That anyone who has an accent can be joked about. Which we see many issues arising from this today. Making fun of an accent is often used in a racist way or saying that someone isn't as smart because they have an accent and you don't.

    2. The success of The Cosby Show, according to Gates, has led to a curious diver~ween media images and social realities. Bill Cosby has 'brclZen the mold of black medta stereotypes and opened up our TV screens to a host of black performers

      Even with good or publicity the show was still getting a lot of public views and this would create talk about the show, and make more people want to see what it's about in either a good or bad light. Like they say bad publicity is good publicity, because you are still relevant.

    3. udiences tune in to be entertaine.d, not to be confr~nted with social roblems. Critical social disorders, like racism, violence, and drug abuse, rely lend themselves to comic treatment; trying to deal with them on a tcom could trivialize issues that deserve serious, thoughtful treatment.

      I understand the point that sitcoms really aren't made to deal with heavy topics, but there are many shows that will still incorporate the heavy topics in, because they find it important. The Fresh Prince of Bel Air being one of them. Through out the entire series they bring up topics like racism, social class, and many more, and truly talk about the issues as well.

    4. The episode that deals with this decision highlights the issue of naming but makes no comment on the chosen names' overt political connotations. The reference to the Mandelas is macj.e quietly and unobtrusively, relying upon the audience's ability to catch the political ra~ifications of the statement.

      The audience who didn't know or understand the references to the political connotations would have never gotten been noticed and without an explanation of the meaning behind it the audience would stay blind to and not become more aware of things like the Mandelas. A show like this could have emphasized it and made it more publicly known.

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