scott does scotland: travel adventures

‘media studies’ revisited

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This is my tenth and final blog post, so I thought I’d use it as an opportunity to look back on the course. First and foremost, this course has forced me to read some literary theory, which I will admit is not my favourite. However, the small dose each week made it more manageable, and I appreciated the ways we were able to connect the things we read about to TV, video games, movies, and other more familiar (and relevant?) examples. The discussions we had in class were thought-provoking, and other seminar…read more

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more on TV

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Side note: this is late and therefore somewhat irrelevant, mostly because I started it two weeks ago and then saved as a draft and promptly forgot in favour of exams. Whoops. Apologies in advance for errors in grammar or sentences that read badly – lately it has been essays > sleep, as is the student way. I had a tough time keeping my presentation down time-wise – there are a lot of things I could say about reality TV, and about TV in general. In high school, all I watched was…read more

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some thoughts from my childhood

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This week’s readings were particularly interesting, and I’m going to focus on one that I really connected with: Valerie Walkerdine’s article on girls and video games. Walkerdine summarizes a Sydney researcher’s observation that girls play video games “more sociably” than boys, as well as the fact that girls “[don’t] play to win” as much as boys do (364). In my experience, there seems to be a difference in the kinds of games aimed at females versus males. We’ve talked about video games a little bit in previous weeks, and I wanted to…read more

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holding the remote and ‘male’ vs. ‘female’ genres

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I, like several of my colleagues, was very interested in Ann Gray’s article and the conclusions it draws about gender and television. Firstly, I got to page 507 (where one of the women interviewed said she would knit if her husband’s program didn’t interest her, and the other referred to the TV as ‘the telly’) and suddenly realized that Ann Gray must be British. This may seem insignificant, but as someone who has half a family’s worth of relatives in small-town Scotland, I can tell you that male-female relations within the…read more

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I am confused and here is why

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This week’s articles were short, and the lazy girl in me was happy about that. But they were also deeply confusing, and my lack of sleep is certainly not helping me understand them more. My colleagues shed some light on these articles today, which was much appreciated. When I read other people’s blogs, I feel like they are nice, concise, essay-like trains of thought. Mine reads more like a rambly stream of consciousness daydream. I hope you will still tolerate me. To close-read a few bits from Raymond Williams: “The magazine, invented…read more

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live music and mp3 thoughts

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This week’s readings were so interesting I almost wish I was doing a seminar on them! Instead I will word vomit into this text box for (likely) no one but my mom to read. Thought #1: Paul Gilroy’s article felt kind of like a halfway point between last week’s focus (on race) and this week’s (on music) to me. I liked the way it talked about blues and the way that some music puts listeners through a physical experience of interpretation. Gilroy describes the “preference for recorded rather than live music”…read more

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black hollywood, ‘what are you?’ and “that’s so raven”

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Today’s class brought up a lot of really interesting stuff for me. I went into this year thinking that 2 hours would feel like an eternity, but more often than not it feels like a fraction of the time needed to fully unpack the stuff we’re reading! Just to add a few things to what I said already today: bell hooks: “Only a few of the black women I talked with remembered the pleasure of race movies, and even those who did, felt that pleasure interrupted and usurped by Hollywood….read more

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“Commodification” and Adventure Time

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Definitely later than I meant to blog – oops. Then again, now I can talk about our class discussion (argument?) on Adorno. Really glad a reading that confused me so much sparked such an interesting discussion! Moments like these remind me why I’m an English major – my peers’ power to help me understand things is a beautiful thing. In fact, it kind of invites a question about media: if I read something and come away with a particular interpretation, but my opinion is changed by my peers, who read the same…read more

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Gender in relation to ‘public’ and ‘private’

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Today’s class sparked some interesting thoughts for me, some of which were not coherent enough to voice in class (or which developed further after leaving the room, as good thoughts inevitably do). In no particular order, some more stuff: Karol’s presentation was titled “Kaleidoscopic frames”. The visual of a kaleidoscope is a powerful one, reminiscent almost of puzzle pieces; each shows a fraction of the whole image, but none independently complete the picture. Are we like this too? Each of us leads a private life (relatively) unknown by others, but we…read more

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opening the coffin …

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I was completely sure that after I finished Arts One, I would never use this blog again. Not so. Here I am, pursuing my dream degree (which is kicking my butt, by the way), and taking a class where blog posts are worth 20(!)% of my final grade: ENGL 491, a seminar on Media Studies. This post will follow my Arts One posts closely in terms of format – I find it easiest to break down dense texts into ideas I can actually understand, using quotes from the authors so I don’t have…read more

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