Chapters 5-7

Before even reading the title of Chapter 5, my mood is already lifted by two characters of The Office being the first picture that I see! The beginning of Chapter 5 talks about how sitcoms popularity declines and how reality shows have taken over.  This is also true in my own house. My parents are addicted to shows like American Idol and Dancing With The Stars. Some of the reality shows I can watch but I don’t ever get attached to them and never have to seen the next episode. I think that reality shows have become more popular because people feel more connected to the “stars” of the show and they feel like they have to cheer on the person that they want to win.

In Chapter 6, the one thing that I thought about the entire chapter was how many TV channels there are. No matter what cable/satellite provider you have, you are getting a lot of channels. My mom has brought up a few times about how when she was young there were only a few channels to choose from and late in the night there would just be static on the TV.  What baffles me is that most of the time there is nothing really interesting on TV. Because I am living in the dorms I don’t have a TV in my room but I can still watch shows on my computer. But I can tell that I watch less television now because I can’t just turn on the television and watch some random show.

In starting off chapter 7, I’m already intrigued because the book brings up Muybridge! I learned a lot about his work in my Photo History class last year and I thought you should know that he also created a gun that takes multiple photographs. It’s pretty cool. In the section Television Changes Hollywood, it talks about how movies tried to drag people away from their television sets. I think that Technicolor was a very smart idea because it gave the people the one thing they couldn’t get from their TV’s, which was color. I found it interesting that 3D movies quickly wore off because now their are the “hot” things in movies now. Personally I’m waiting for 3D movies to go out of style again because I think that they are a really cheap way to make more money on a movie.

The Photographic Gun

Helium running low?

Brand New: Logos

Brand New is a blog by Underconsideration, which is "a blog devoted solely to the monitoring, discussion and critique of brand and corporate identity work in all its manifestations and across all categories." Basically they post companies logos and write articles about them. I'm a photography major and I've never really payed much attention to logos before, but after discovering this website I can't help myself from noticing them. And I learned that Myspace and Gap were creating new logos. Well as you will see in this article, Gap's logo was quickly shut down by the public.

Don't mind the Gap

and!

Gap-Undo

This article made me hungry

IHOP?

Media and Culture Chapters 1+2

In reading chapters 1 and 2 from Media and Culture, one section that caught my eye was “The Power of Media in Everyday Life”. What made this section catch my eye was that it was talking about how ancient Greeks described art. Plato thought it should instruct and uplift. Aristotle believed that “art and stories should provide insight to the human condition” but also be entertaining.  And Euripides believed that the arts should imitate life. I was intrigued by this paragraph because it reminds me of my Historical Intro to Philosophy class. On the first day of class, we had a discussion to determine “what is art”. For three hours we discussed our views upon what we thought art was, if bad art was also considered art, etc. I feel as though that you can give examples of art and culture, maybe you can loosely describe them but they are forever changing. Therefore there definitions are always changing and can never really be defined.

  In reading chapter 2, I discovered something very interesting. “The Net Widens” section states that in the “mid-1980’s fiber-optic cables became the standard for transmitting communication data”. I find this very interesting because Verizon commercials boast about how their tv connection uses fiber-optics. I don’t know anything about how their system works or if they upgraded their fiber-optics to make it faster and better then when it first came out in the 80’s (I sure hope they did). I just find it very interesting that they make it seem as though their system is new and innovative.  

Verizon Fios Commercial

Life

Life on other plant?

In this article on cnn, they talk about how this planet has a high probably that it can sustain life. But we wont get there for 220 years! I want to know now!