Media Literacy Education: October 2014

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Extra Credit: Jonathan McIntosh talk

"Building a Critical Culture with Remix Video" by Jonathan McIntosh

Right Wing Radio Duck Activity

Now let's discuss this political remix in relation to some principles of media literacy:

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony

Remixing: A Primer

Adding - take something, and add something else to it

L.H.O.O.Q. by Marcel Duchamp

Cutting - take something, and then cut some things out of it...

...and then maybe, reassemble those things into something new...

..or even, reassemble those things with other things to make something new...

Manipulating - take something and change its form, but not its content...

...for example, slow it down...

...or...(actually, I don't even know how to describe this...)

Covering - take something and re-make it...

...maybe in a different medium...

...or a different style...

...or maybe in a different genre...

...or take the style of one thing and combine it with the genre of another...

...which leads us to...

Mashing - take something and combine it with another thing

Magritte Meets Mario

"There Goes the Neighborhood" by Coran Stone

Revising - take something and change its content...

...for example, swapping the genders of the main characters...

Expanding - take something and add more to its content...

"Snowy" from Fallen Princesses by Dina Goldstein

De-centering - look at something from another perspective from within that something

Star Wars: Tag and Bink are Dead from Dark Horse Comics

Iron Man fan fiction by obsession_inc - read it here

Recontextualizing - take something and put in a new place, time, circumstance

"BERNABE MENDEZ from the State of Guerrero works as a professional window cleaner in New York He sends 500 dollars a month" from Superheroes by Dulce Pinzon

Transforming - take something and make it something entirely new (yet still kind of the same)

Also, this is a cool, related resource from Jonathan McIntosh (the guy behind Buffy vs. Edward, etc.)

A history of subversive remix videos before YouTube: Thirty political video mashups made between World War II and 2005 - by Jonathan McIntosh

Robin Hood: A Case Study

"Recent work in cultural studies directs attention to the meanings text accumulate through their use. The reader's activity is no longer seen as the task of recovering the author's meanings but also as reworking borrowed materials to fit them into the context of lived experience. Michel de Certeau (1984) writes, 'Every reading modifies its object...The reader takes neither the position of the author nor the author's position. He invents in the text something different from what they intended. He detaches them from their (lost or accessory) origin. He combines their fragments and creates something unknown' (169). This modification need not be understood as textual 'disintegration' but rather as home improvements that refit prefabricated materials to consumer desires. The text becomes something more than it was before, not something less."

- Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, 1992.

"...the tales are reflections of the social order in a given historical epoch, and, as such, they symbolize the aspirations, needs, dreams and wishes of common people in a tribe, community or society, either affirming the dominant social values and norms or revealing the necessity to change them. According to the evidence we have, gifted narrators told tales to audiences who actively participated in their transmission by posing questions, suggesting changes and circulating the tales among themselves. The key to comprehending the folk tale and its volatile quality is an understanding of the audience and reception aesthetics."

- Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales, 2002.

Statue of Robin Hood in Nottingham

(clockwise from top left): Douglas Fairbanks (1922); Kevin Costner (1991); Errol Flynn (1938); illustration by N.C. Wyeth (1917); Jonas Armstrong (2006); Cary Elwes (1993); Russell Crowe (2010); animation by Walt Disney Productions (1973).

Robin Hood --> Green Arrow --> Katniss Everdeen

And then there's this guy...I'm still not sure how I feel about him.

The CW's 'Arrow'

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Fan-Sexism Update

“Just as studying fan culture helped us to understand the innovations that occur on the fringes of the media industry, we may also want to look at the structures of fan communities as showing us new ways of thinking about citizenship and collaboration. The political effects of these fan communities come not simply through the production and circulation of new ideas (the critical reading of favorite texts) but also through access to new social structures (collective intelligence) and new models of cultural production (participatory culture). Have I gone too far? Am I granting too much power here to these consumption communities? Perhaps. But keep in mind that I am not really trying to predict the future. I want to avoid the kind of grand claims about the withering away of mass media institutions that make the rhetoric of the digital revolution seem silly a decade later. Rather, I am trying to point toward the democratic potentials found in some contemporary cultural trends.” (Jenkins 2006, 246-7)

"We are long past the point where we can get away with either fully celebratory or fully cynical accounts of the changes that have been set in motion by these shifts in who has access to the means of cultural production and circulation...Chris Kelty sums up the problem: ''Participating' in Facebook is not the same thing as participating in a Free Software project, to say nothing of participating in the democratic governance of a state. If there are indeed different 'participatory cultures' then the work of explaining their differences must be done by thinking completely differently about the practices, tools, ideologies, and technologies that make them up. Participation is about power, and no matter how 'open' a platform is, participation will reach a limit circumscribing power and its distribution.' (2013, 29)" (Jenkins 2014)

Misogyny Island 'choose your own adventure' game.

Here is a link to my annotated bibliography, in progress.