Archive for 2014

So on Wednesday we talked a little bit about new media in our discussion of parental monitoring.  And it made me think about something I think about a lot- how parents need to be up-to-date on the technology that their kids are going to be using.  I mean, it's a pretty tall order for parents to be in on everything their kids are using, especially since they go to pretty decent lengths to keep it hidden from their parents.  I mean, I know I definitely did not let my parents see all the stuff I got up to on the internet when I was a teenager, mostly just because it was super super nerdy (coughharrypotterfanfictioncough).  But there's also the fact that I had to teach my mom how to double-click.  I know my mom has gotten a lot better at staying relatively  current in more recent years- she has a twitter account purely so she can follow my younger sisters and see what they're up to, for example.  But I know there are plenty of parents out there who "keep their heads in the sand" when it comes to the emerging technology, especially the numerous social networking platforms out there.  
So it begs the question: where is the line?  How current do parents need to stay without letting it actually take over their lives?  It's a tough thing to figure out seeing as these are all new problems without much research to guide people along.  The minute you have one thing figured out, the next thing comes along and takes over.  I mean, it was not that long ago that myspace ruled the teen world online, and now it's next to irrelevant.  And how many teenagers can you think of that are going to train their parents to use their social networking platforms just so that they can more efficiently track them?  I know I wouldn't have, and I wasn't even getting up to any shenanigans.

Guys, check out this Canadian Duracell advertisement.  I had to actually put my hands on my face while I watched it, it was so cute.

So if you live or work in the Provo area you doubtless know about the "serial groper."  He's this guy who's been going around assaulting women on or around campus and he hasn't been nabbed yet.  Now, perverts around here aren't exactly a new thing. It's actually a real problem in this area because people are so trusting and women here are even more afraid of reporting stuff like that than in most places.  It's just that he's gotten really famous because it's the same guy and he keeps doing it and getting away.

Here, read this article about something Divergent gets so so right.  [it discusses rape and rape culture so you have been warned].  [also there are some story spoilers if you care about that]

The article pretty much covers it all.  I pray for more and more stories that show women that they have the right to be respected and listened to and that show strong, likable, admirable men who respect women. Stories that show boys that doing so is what makes them manly, not the reverse.
I am a feminist because I believe that men are capable of better than what our culture tells them they are, and I appreciate Divergent so much because of that.

In conjunction with our discussion of media violence on Wednesday and of princesses and gender roles on Monday, I would like to present to you the realization I had the other day.
Okay so my favorite Disney movies have always been Beauty and the Beast, Mulan, and Pocahontas.  When I was a toddler Beauty and the Beast was that movie that I watched ad nauseum, had memorized, basically worshiped.  I loved Belle because she loved to read and wanted adventures and had brown hair like me and thought Gaston was a jerk.  Also I loved the music. When Pocahontas came out I was five years old, and I was all about her super long hair and the fact that she loved the environment like I did and was the one who saved the boy.  I LOVED that.  Also the music was beautiful. When Mulan came out when I was eight I loved her for again being the day who saved the day, and in the end being a hero who still got to be a girl.  Plus again, music.
Changing gears though, there is a lot of violence in those movies for a kid of age eight and below to be seeing.  The Beast and Gaston battle it out on top of the castle and Gaston stabs the Beast in the side with a big scary dagger and there is blood.  Then the dude falls off the castle to his death. Yikes.
In Pocahontas, our girl herself is very "hey no don't fight each other that's stupid," but there's still plenty of fighting.  Our boy Thomas shoots Kokoum and emotionally scars a generation.  The two sides go to WAR with each other, even if the only gunshot is the one that hits John Smith in the end.  But man.  Shooting.
But then. BUT THEN.  There's Mulan.  I mean, yes, this is a movie based off the story of a war hero, so obviously there's going to be war involved.  But the fact the remains that Mulan goes to training camp and learns to fight, then goes to war with the Huns where she starts an avalanche that kills thousands of people.  I will say again: the heroine of this movie has a body count in the thousands.  Not to mention that we see the battlefield wasteland the Huns left behind when they decimated the imperial army, plus more fighting once they get to the imperial city.  That is a violent movie.
Does that mean they're bad movies?  No.  Do I think I am more aggressive as a result of being obsessed with them?  I don't think so.  I mean, I like to think I got the right messages from those movies, especially because I identified with them so strongly because those main characters embodied so many characteristics that I already had and/or valued.  But still- thousands.  Yikes!

So I watch a lot of television. But here's the thing; I don't just watch the shows I watch. I engross myself. I talk about them with my friends. I discuss them on blogs. I read and participate in meta-analyses.

If you are a fan of the show Community, you know that they are all about tropes. Pretty much every episode is devoted to exploring one or more common television tropes, and thanks to Abed's obsession with them and his fourth-wall-flirting descriptions, we usually know exactly which ones.

There was an episode where Troy and Abed got into a fight over whether they would build a blanket fort or a pillow fort, and the entire episode was formatted like an overly-dramatic history documentary.

Another one was a straight-up parody of Law and Order: SVU.

Zombie movies. Buddy-cop shows. Video games. Christmas specials. Glee. Old west. Terrible horror movie. Alternate timelines (my personal favorite).

You name it, they've done it, or at least referenced it. This season, the actor playing Troy was only in the first few episodes because he decided to leave the show to pursue his music career. The writers didn't even try to pretend it wasn't happening.

gif replacement due to language: Troy says, "That son of a *****!"

Okay, they seriously just had Abed tell us, "Look, we know this might suck because Troy was one of your favorite characters, but we're going to do the best we can. And also we're still a little bitter that Donald is leaving and we're going to make him apologize to you."

And it's not just the plotlines. It's the main characters, too.

Jeff, the jerk with a heart of gold, aware of his own good looks, works hard to be lazy, daddy issues, glue of the group... I could go on and on.

My personal favorite character, Shirley, the overly-sweet yet also sometimes emotionally manipulative mother type. Kills with kindness. Christian who accepts other religions but whoa hey actually doesn't really.

Don't get on her bad side.

To avoid this turning into an entire dissertation, I'll leave you with this: this show is a treasure and you should watch it and enjoy the genius of its writing, because it has everything that someone who is interested in actively participating in their media consumption could want in a tv show.

Also bad puns.

In the video we watched in class about representation of women in media, much of its time was devoted to women in politics and news reporting.  At one point there was a montage men in news broadcasting saying ridiculously sexist things, and let me tell you... my rage was real.  Like my pulse was elevated and I had to just clamp my jaw shut to keep myself from yelling at the screen.
So along those lines, here's another gem from one of my favorite sexists, Bill O'Reilly.

When I was a student at Cambridge I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. “This is often considered to be man’s first attempt at a calendar” she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. ‘My question to you is this – what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.’

It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women’s contributions?

Dale Spencer in Australia used audio and video tape to independently evaluate who talked the most in mixed-gender university classroom discussions. Regardless of the gender ratio of the students, whether the instructor was deliberately trying to encourage female participation or not, men always talked more—whether the metric was minutes of talking or number of words spoken. Moreover, men literally have no clue how much they talk. When Spencer asked students to evaluate their perception of who talked more in a given discussion, women were pretty accurate; but men perceived the discussion as being “equal” when women talked only 15% of the time, and the discussion as being dominated by women if they talked only 30% of the time.Spencer’s conclusion, if I may paraphrase: you only think we talk too much because you’d rather we were silent.

Hey kiddos,

"More insidiously, children’s books with girl protagonists sometimes celebrate their heroines to a fault. Isn’t it amazing that a girl did these things, they seem to say—implying that these heroines are a freakish exception to their gender, not an inspiration for readers to follow."

If you've ever spent any amount of time on the social networking blogging site tumblr, you know that it is a place where sanity goes to die.  There's a LOT of stupidity and other things of an undesirable nature, but if you follow the right people, it's also a fountain of creativity and ingenuity.  Since it's kind of its own little corner of the internet, it tends to generate its own inside jokes, trends, and language quirks.  Oh, and most of those funny posts you see on facebook?  Yeah, those were stolen either from reddit or someone's tumblr blog.
Anyhoo, one of the finest tumblr traditions is making hundreds of absolutely ridiculous and intentionally poorly-made fandom or pop culture-related Valentines, usually involving poorly cropped pictures, bad puns, and comic sans.  Here are a few treasures from this year:

On Wednesday in class we talked about music... I was very much in my element.  Not only do I listen to a LOT of music, but I love talking about it and am very interested in the social, political, personal, and other effects and influences involved in the music that our society produces.  
My personal music taste is extremely varied, and I really mean it when I say that.  I really had to rein myself back in class to stop myself from talking during the entire class.  It was bad.
But one of the comments I made was about Janelle Monáe, and I feel like she deserves to be talked about much more, so here we go.
Janelle Monáe is an American R&B/soul artist. She is 5'2", wears mostly tuxedos and sports coiffed hair most of the time, and is absolutely adorable. Evidence of adorable follows: