A Tribute to Kelsey

As the semester comes to an end, high school students are in the midst of choosing what to do after graduation. This morning, a student for Kempville – Kelsey, got to experience university first hand by attending one of Dr. Strangelove’s lectures. If it was her first – or only – class of the day (she participated in the UofO’s Student for a Dayprogram), Dr. Strangelove’s lecture may have skewed her opinion of university life when he ended lecture by having five students stand up at the front of the class and create a video for YouTube.

The University of Ottawa’s website explains their Student for a Dayprogram as a way to better acquaint oneself with faculty members and the campus while attending classes, touring residence buildings and meeting with an academic advisor. The website also claims to personalize schedules based on expectations and interests. Accordingly then, we can assume that come September, Kelsey may be one of the many incoming freshmen Commies (Communication Students).

Kelsey, like all of the graduating class of 2013 and a most if not all of the current undergraduate students at universities across the country, is part of the Net Generation. An article in The Chronicle of Higher Educationasks the question of whether or not universities and their professors should cater to the incoming tech-savvy students by creating blogs, using iPods, and incorporating video games into teaching styles. The Chronicleattributes impatience amongst intelligence to the Net Generation and claims that students do not want to sit and hear a lecture for a hour. But some say that today’s undergraduates are not so different from the Baby-boomer generation that higher education was created for (The Chronicle). Michael Gorman of the California State University at Fresno is one of those people – he doesn’t believe that incoming students require a new approach to teaching (The Chronicle). Similarly, Naomi S. Baron of American University explains that “It is very common to hear people say, Here’s the Millennial or the digital generation, and we have to figure out how they learn. Poppycock. We get to mold how they learn” (The Chronicle). Baron also states that if universities cater to the Net Generation, they will only hurt higher education.

Whether universities choose to further incorporate technology into their teaching or whether they will continue to use traditional methods and means of teaching will be interesting to note as the Net Generation moves swiftly through the college institution.

But for now all I can say is Welcome to Kesley and the freshmen of 2009 and Au Revoir to CMN 2180: Popular Culture and Communication.

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Sources:

University of Ottawa Website (Student for a Day) – http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/eng/students/student-for-a-day.html

The Chronicle of Higher Education. The Net Generation Goes to College. http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i07/07a03401.htm

Dancing in the reflection of a beat

Dance. It is the least theorized area of popular culture (Goodwin). It is also incredibly difficult define. Personally, I consider the word “dance” to be an umbrella term for all types of movement. It may be easier to separate the categories of dance into their own terms instead of adding a word before “dance” as a way of differentiating the styles and other movements (e.g. tribal dance, contemporary dance, etc.). But the particular type of dance I’m interested in is the movement used in music videos.

Music videos have produced classic dance moves such as Chuck Barry’s “duck walk” and Michael Jackson’s “moonwalk” (Goodwin). These moves, as well as others, have attempted to visualize the music and lyrics of a song by stylizing and creating emotion for said song. Furthermore, Goodwin states that dance elements in music videos tend to reflect the tempo of a song in order to emphasize the rhythm. He specifically points out gestures and specific movements. For example, in OK GO’s video for the song Here It Goes Again, the group uses head movements that are synchronized with the music to emphasize specific beats.

In addition to specific gestures, the tempo of the movements often reflect that of the song – fast movements calls for fast music (Goodwin). However, though admittedly not exactly pertaining to music videos, dance moves do have the ability to work in the opposite manor. For example, So You Think You Can Dance introduced a hybrid style of dance onto their show last season – lyrical hip hop. The style incorporates the sharp, hard hitting movement of hip hop with more fluid music. But whatever style f dance is used, the element of dance creates feeling in the music (Goodwin).

Going back to music videos, Goodwin explains that in order to increase harmonic development (while emphasizing rhythm and drawing out emotion) dance routines (i.e choreographed scenes in musicals, the kind you always dreamed of pulling out of nowhere well strolling down the sidewalk or the halls of your high school) generally occur during instrumental sections of the song or during the middle-eight sequence. The middle-eight sequence is the “section in a song that tends to happen towards the middle of the song, and tends to be eight bars in length” (BBC Radio). Furthermore, the middle-eight breaks up the simple repetitive patterns in music -verse/chorus/verse/chorus, (BBC Radio), which reflects the “break up” of movement by using a choreographed group routine. Take for example Fall Out Boy’s video for their song Dance Dance. Throughout the video there is a large amount of chaotic, unchoreographed movement but near the end in an almost entirely instrumental section, the movement develops into choreographed bliss.

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Sources:

Goodwin, A. Dancing in the Distraction Factory: music television and popular culture.

BBC Radio. Song Writing Guides – middle eight. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/soldonsong/guide/song_middle.shtml

The wonderful thing about Twitter…

Nope. Drawing a blank.

Twitter.com has been around for a while but like most social networking sites, it took some time to make its way into the lives of the general public. Personally, I first heard of twitter a few months ago but didn’t really know what it was and didn’t care enough to research it. Then Ellen DeGeneres joined Twitter and announced to the world how the website worked on her daily talkshow.

I found the following video on the pros and cons of Twitter and I can’t say that the pros are really winning. Sure Twitter.com allows me to inform the Internet that I just drank some chocolate milk, posted on my blog, or cracked my back(or I could use my blog, like I just did), but I would be wrong to think that more than two people actually care. So thanks to the video below I will be staying as far away from Twitter as I can because: No, I don’t really care and I’m sure if its important, you’ll tell me some other way. Like in person, over the phone, or … on your Facebook status.

Now I’m: off to take a shower.

P.S. -

The video on the pros and cons of Twitter does a great job on explaining the benefits and downfalls of the site as well as social networking sites in general. Johneepixels7 concludes his video by stating that the Internet and its ability to take social interaction out of the social context will not result in euphoria. On the contrary, we will become increasingly detached from other people as well as the world around us as everything goes virtual.

Check it Out:

Animation Evolution

Computer generated imagery or CGI is taking over the world. Well the TV and movie world at least. In 1995 Toy Story became the first fully computer generated motion picture and ever since, CGI has become increasingly visible. Co what ever happened to traditional hand drawn animation? Classics like Steamboat Willie and A Charlie Brown Christmasexperienced immense success and today, the Charlie Brown TV specials still entertain children and adults. But CGI now seems to be the animation of choice as classic children’s television shows, for example Winnie the Pooh, have been recreated with computer imagery. Personally, I prefer hand drawn animation over CGI, despite growing up during the emergence of CGI motion pictures (I was six when Toy Story hit theatres).

So for our viewing pleasure, I’ve included a rather adorable student-made hand animated video that I found on YouTube – which despite, CGI’s popularity, is home to over 12,000 videos featuring aspiring artists’ skillful hand animation.

Depth of Girls:

I. Want. To. Rock.

Lawrence Grossberg introduces the theory of rock formation in his book We Gotta Get Out of This Place: popular conservatism and postmodern culture. Grossberg defines formation as:

“A configuration of practices that form a particular structure of unity which transcends any single group’s relation to the practices. The configuration allows certain practices to exist and to have power within its boundaries. For example: the broad notion of rock culture”

In other words, it is an identifiable set of practices that we group together. These groups transcend existing groups of people (corporate bodies, elites, etc.) so that no single group can own or control the practice. However, Grossberg explains that the rock formation finds itself outside the consensus in which it has located itself – it did not belong where it though it did. Additionally, rock’s challenges did not come from the formation but from outsiders and direct opposition.

Perhaps as a result, rock distanced itself from the dominant structure of daily life. The dominant ways of thinking, dominant and accepted practices as determined by culture, became irrelevant to rock. Thus unlike folk, punk, and gospel music, rock is not inherently political, it has no essential political disposition.

So it stands to be concluded that rock, while distancing itself from dominant culture and finding itself outside of the formation, acts as a form or cultural, but not political, rebellion.

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Source:

Grossberg, L. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: popular conservatism and post modern culture.

Truth 101

Not Truth but Truthiness

Truthiness: the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true (Merriam-Webster Online)

In Stephen Colbert’s first episode of The Colbert Report, Colbert “coined the term ‘truthiness’, which went on to become Merriam-Webster’s 2006 Word of the Year” (Colbert Nation). The term reinvents the meaning of the truth not as solid fact but as a scale of personal opinion. Colbert defined the term as “truth that comes from the gut, not books” (Merriam-Webster Online) and Dr. Stranglelove further explained it as not being designed from facts of the matter but by how much one feels it to be true (Strangelove).  In other words if we believe in something enough, it has full potential to be the truth. Or would be a lie?

Not Lies but Bullsh*t

Bullshit: nonsense, lies, or exaggeration (Dictionary.com)

On Bullshit- Harry G. Frankfurt’s book on the theory of bullshit (from here on referred to as BS), attempts to differentiateBS from lying.  In Tuesday’s lecture, Dr. Strangelove introduced some aspects of Frankfurt’s theory:

BS, in a social context is a rhetorical game that should not be taken seriously (Strangelove). We currently live in the age of BS – it surrounds every aspect of our lives. There is BS in politics, in advertising, and students often refer to BS-ing their work. It is constantly a part of our society. But why shouldn’t we take BS seriously?

Dr. Strangeloveexplained in lecture that in this day and age, advertisers, politicians, and public relation specialists are all lyingto us. They know it and so do we. We know that the people we are supposed to turn to for leadership are lying. We know that the people who are supposed to make our lives better (with the help of consumer products) are lying. But we don’t take their lies for what they are. We don’t take them seriously, we account for apathy, and so the capitalist, democratic system works.

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Sources:

Bullshit. Dictionary.Com. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bullshit

Truthiness. Merriam-Webster Online. http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/06words.htm

Strangelove. Lecture Notes March 24, 2009.

Colbert Nation. http://www.colbertnation.com/about

The Life and Death of You (Tube?)

Birth. Search it on YouTube and you’ll find way to many birthing videos – and not just of human babies, but of dogs, kangaroos, and the odd giraffe.

This morning’s lecture shed some light on post-modernism and its impact on today’s culture (or culture’s impact on it). In typical Dr. Strangelove fashion, the lecture covered academic jargon, a music video or two, very interesting yet unrelated factoids about popular culture, and to close it off, a video of the real-time, unassisted (Vets don’t count, right?) birth of baby Maelle. No, wait. That last part is so not typical Dr. Strangelove!

Dr. Strangelove explain that in a span of only three generations, women have gone from basically disappearing for nine months out of shame to filming and posting home birthing videos on the Internet. This transformation is the start of what is known as Lifecasting. Lifecasting is the “continual broadcast of events in a person’s life through digital media” (Wikipedia). The birthing videos that pop up all over YouTube set in motion a lifetime of captured moments that are displayed to the world by means of video sharing websites. These children are born into a limited limelight and are readily available for viewing. Though the Internet isn’t the only means of broadcasting ones birthing stories as shows like A Baby Storyair on TLC. In other words, people are making their own reality television, starring themselves, that document every moment of their lives. Think the Gosselin kids in  Jon and Kate Plus Eight minus the editing and planned events.

Furthermore, as recently as the early 1990s – when video sharing was non-existent and the beginnings of the YouTube generation were just being brought into the world, the video camera was used to take home videos that stayed private. Home videos reflects those that are currently on YouTube but involved more milestone events than everyday life. As Dr. Strangelove explains, home videos in the mid twentieth century filmed birthday and New Years parties, not playing cats.

The evolution of home videos and their newly public status reflects post-modern thinking. Modernism institutionalized birth (and death) by moving birth from the home to the hospital (Strangelove) and now post-modernism, with the help of a small percentage of the population, is breaking down the institution and bringing birth back into the home and back into the control of the parents, where the parents have the freedom to display both their own and their child’s life through video.

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If you’re feeling brave (video of Maelle’s birth): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0HTiOvOPZw

Sources:

Dr. Strangelove, Lecture Notes March 24, 2009

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifecasting_(video_stream)