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Showing posts from April, 2009

Media Literacy in Cinematic Society

This is going to be my last blog entry for this course. It seems that we jump over a variety of topics for three months in a congested classroom. The media literacy in this class has been like cultural studies. In this criticism about media-saturated society, Denzin says we inhibit a secondhand world that is mediated by cinema, television and calls it ‘cinematic society’. He continues to say that we have no direct access to the world, thus experiencing only its representations. It sounds very postmodern. Fragmented experiences with media constitute a reality in a sense that we make a sense out of the experiences. These experiences may not be congruent with one another and elicit our reflection in fluidity. If so, it is safe to say that media literacy takes another form of cultural studies. Along with this course, I also taught two lab sessions of an undergraduate course. Teaching this course based on a Do-It-Yourself ethic was very enjoyable and rewarding. In particular, this is my fir

How we learn through collaborative media production

Recently my head spins around how we learn when members of a community participate and collaborate to produce a collective media project. I attempt to break down into two fundamental different modes of knowledge production. First a new level of knowledge can be obtained by juxtaposing individual knowledge or experience with one another or putting them altogether. A video made by community members in New Orleans is a good example. A member in the video shows a big list where all the people in the city were murdered are written since January 2007. The list itself is a kind of collaborative media project that brings dispersed experience/knowledge together and the video disseminates the collective knowledge created through the list-making project. This is a powerful process of collective knowledge production. The second mode I intend to formulate takes the opposite direction in a sense. In this mode, new knowledge can be produced by turning the familiar into the unfamiliar. In other words,

Freedom Writers

Directed by Richard LaGravenese (2007) It is based on a true story, but why do I feel it is more fiction-like than Entre les murs, which is based on a fiction novel. I think, first of all, it is because the screenplay follows a Hollywood convention with successive pauses for catharsis effect, which made me so emotional each time. This is a common device utilized in feel-so-good movies. In addition, the teacher in the movie never gives up her belief and succeeds in all her attempts. This factor provides the movie with a strong backbone that extends to the end of the movie. The teacher is a heroine evidently. Yes, it is true that the story itself is extremely compelling and what she did is highly remarkable in the real life. But in comparison to The Class (Entre les murs, 2008), I ask why remarkable stories are predominantly made in this movie industry. I think this is the basic mechanism in which Hollywood movies, in particular, is made. It fabricates reviewers’ dreams of wishing to se

Give Peace a Chance!

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This afternoon I went to the Museum of Fine Arts to see the exhibition, Imagine, that was prepared to celebrate the 40th John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s famous Bed-in in Montreal in 1969. They did this performance during their honeymoon. Expecting intensive media attention, they wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to promote world peace, so they began this Bed-in performance in Amsterdam for a week. Then, they planned to go to New York, but Lennon’s entry was denied because of his drug conviction record, so flew to Bahamas. After spending one night in the heat, they flew again to Montreal. So, it seems that they happened to have the second Bed-in performance in Montreal by chance. It appeared that they received sufficient media attention. I wonder whether the media was disappointed that they were wearing pajamas all the time in their bed. This performance, in particular, was done after their sensational nude album jacket was released and Ono’s groundbreaking conceptual art had draw