In the absence of our illustrious professor, the group (slightly thinned) carried on, and spend the period brainstorming various topics for our final project. One girl took the initiative to write on the board, and recorded our comments. The list:

-use of podcasting in education
-youtube and comedy
-second life- way to make $ with it?
-sykpe (holding meetings online)
-art in multimedia and advertizing, ex/flickr
-performance of writing: blogs- interchanging of medium and audience. facebook- life as a performance
-video performance- streaming in both directions (actors see live audience)
-Alice- programming for dummies
-e-comerce
-improv everywhere

So far in New Media Studies, a recurring class theme has been ways in which humans shape culture and technology, but how now our very creations have come to inluence us instead. We are no longer the gods of our own machines. Dr. Campbell has suggested that with technology becoming more and more sophisticated, we as independent-thinking humans need to increase our game as it were- we need to strive to stay ahead of culture- to not let it shape us, not just reproduce the same images and themes that are constantly thrust upon us. In order to solidify this concept of humans shaping culture versus culture shaping humans, I will now give (what I cnsider to be) an interesting example from Dr. Harding’s ENG 372 class- Contemporary Drama and Performance Studies.

The other day Dr. Harding was discussing a theme similar to NMS- ways Life can actually immitate art, instead of Art immitating life. He brought up a disturbing story about U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Apparently bored soldiers have been watching a little too much of the hit tv show 24. I have never seen this show, but apparently many episodes feature Jack Bauer using many creative torture methods to “patriotically” extract information from his prisoners. Upon seeing such violence glorified on tv, impressionable young soldiers have been trying out these torture techniques in real life- a horrifying example of life immitating art, of humans kowtowing to Culture.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haptic

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