Sample Titles for COMM2 Section A

Communication and Culture: Unit 2

Sample Titles for COMM2

Section A: Readings

Exploration

In contrast to the investigation, the second reading of 1,000 words asks the candidate to move away from the personal to an examination of their culture and the cultural practices within it. Best responses achieve a critical distance which is informed by the opinions and views of others, rewarded through Assessment Objective 4.

Site B:

Topics Family Life

1. Outnumbered? Power relationships in the family

2. The one and only: exploring the myth of the only child

3. Family fictions: The Simpsons as a representation of the modern family

4. Single parent families: subverting the norm or becoming the norm?

5. Virtual reunion: the impact of social networking sites on adopted families

6. TV Dinners and Takeaways: Exploring the impact of the decline in family mealtimes

7. Selling the family: reading representations of the family in advertising

8. Shooting the family: the construction of family life in home movies/photographs

9. The connected family; how communication technology keeps the family in touch

10. Why don’t families understand teenagers?

She’s got wheels: transportation as cultural practice.

1. Blades of glory: rollerblading as transportation

2. The micro-scooter: a symbol of the noughties?

3. Gotta feel for my automobile: personifying the car

4. Riding in style: exploring the limo phenomenon

5. The four-wheeled status symbol: the meaning of prams

6. Sk8er Boi: Skateboarding and gender

7. Riding the school bus: transport and socialisation

8. Is that a catalytic converter in your pocket? Rebranding the car as saviour of the environment

9. Full metal jacket: cars as adornment

10. A tour de force: the renaissance of the bicycle

In my room: personal places and their wider cultural significance.

This topic allows a lot of opportunity for a range of interesting responses. However, it is important that the chosen room is first of all defined and that it allows for an exploration of the various functions, cultural practices, values and expectations of those who use/live in it. The room selected may be real or fictional and indeed, to achieve a degree of objectivity and critical distance, students may be advised to explore a room which belongs to someone else. Students should be encouraged to consider why a particular room is important for a given individual, what functions it serves and what it tells others about that room’s inhabitant.

1. Why is the teenage bedroom often a source of family conflict?

2. From the Aga to the microwave: the changing face of the contemporary kitchen.

3. My sister’s bedroom: exploring pink and purple.

4. The Living Room: a ‘vivisection’.

5. My posh friend’s bedroom is bigger than our lounge! Exploring the spatial metaphor.

6. The Trotter’s Living Room: how the other ‘arf live.

7. Sitting in their Sitting Room: the Simpsons and family values.

8. The science lab: just another classroom?

9. My Dad’s workshop: more than just a room for his tools.

10. Back to the past: my Nan’s front room.

Sample Titles for COMM2 Section A

Communication and Culture: Unit 2

Sample Titles for COMM2

Section A: Readings

Investigation

This must be on personal identity and once a Site A Topic has been selected, it is important to create a title which allows candidates to demonstrate engagement with key concepts from the course within the scope of a 500 word reading. Titles which are too vague or overly ambitious will prevent candidates from achieving this. It is good practice to make use of the personal pronoun and the two step flow model, as exemplified below, which has proven to be very successful in encouraging both a personal and focused response.

Site A: Topics

The Stories Of Our Lives

1. A Story From My Childhood

2. Kids’ TV and Me

3. Every picture tells a story: how my photo album tells the story of my life

4. Writing on the wall: how I have constructed a life through my Facebook profile

5. A life in songs: Investigating my soundtrack

6. Gotta have faith: the stories of my religion

7. ‘Bigger Boys and Stolen Sweethearts’: investigating the story of my school life

8. E4 and me: viewing my life through Inbetweeners (or Skins/Misfits/ Hollyoaks)

9. I remember it well: how my gran’s memories tell my story

10. DearDiary: how I tell my private story

Everything I own: what stuff means.

1. The child in me: why I still have my cuddly toys

2. Fender forever: what my guitar says about me

3. Magic wand: why I love my GHDs

4. Me and my ipod: my life in a silver case

5. Exposed: what my digital camera reveals about my identity

6. What a marvel: my identity as a fan of super-hero comics

7. Lipstick on your collar: my makeup collection and me

8. Box set: Collecting DVDs as souvenirs

9. Badge of honour: how my badges communicate who I am

10. Consoles and gadgets: my identity as a technophile

Clothes make the person: to what extent are we what we wear?

1. On me ‘ead! The effect wearing different hats can make on my self-presentation and on the perceptions of others.

2. This is me: do you have to believe in what it says on the front of your t-shirt?

3. ‘You’re not going out looking like that!’ How much other people’s perceptions of me

are shaped by what I wear.

4. The rebel in me: why I hate my school uniform.

5. Clothes maketh the woman: why I love my designer labels.

6. ‘My shoes are killing me!’ Why I am in love with my high heels.

7. Don’t judge me totally by my cover! Do clothes reveal all about my identity?

8. I’m the new Metrosexual: I’m a boy and I like fashion too!

9. The uniform of the independence: why I love my jeans.

10. This isn’t really me: what my work uniform says about the company I work for.

Semiotics

Semiotics

View more presentations from Rob McMinn

Feminism and the media

Feminism and the media

View more presentations from Rob McMinn

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in Interpersonal Communication

Communication Theory

Interpersonal Communications Model

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy/NVC

This experiment explores common situations to test to see what variables are more likely to elicit a protective response from strangers. A normal-looking woman leaves her belongings unattended at the beach and a man (part of the experiment) comes by and steals her Ipod and speakers. No one really helps, though they notice, but if the normal-looking woman makes small talk with people nearby, they are much more likely to respond to the thief.

Switch the normal-looking woman for someone much more attractive and things change. She doesn't have to even make small talk - people step in to react when the thief steals her things but the difference is they all noticed her more... because we notice beautiful people, we're more aware of them when they're near us. Take that same beautiful woman, though, and tell her to come on to another woman's husband a bit... she's suddenly not someone to just observe, she becomes a threat and is treated quite differently.

We've been talking about Attribution theory, how we categorize people and assume qualities they have based on how they fit into our schemas, or prior categories of knowledge. Beautiful people are considered differently - we assume if they are beautiful then they are also all the other positive qualities: moral, intelligent, honest, caring, good, etc.

Men and woman obviously categorize people visually by different criteria. The most attractive looking women were rated as very friendly by men but rated in the middle by women. Very attractive women seem to be read as a threat by other women, as is the example in one scenario of this video. Maybe is there an example here of an Attribution theory error - the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy... where the woman treated the beautiful woman (in the experiment) based on her initial impression of her and then looked for behaviour from the woman to confirm that initial impression.

Past Exam Papers: Guidance

What is done with each question is perhaps a key performance indicator, hence the need for confidence with the concepts rather than encyclopaedic knowledge. Those who show independent thought on issues will naturally be highest rewarded but secure understanding of the key concepts is the best preparation. This is crudely what the course is about and best prepares candidates for a key question examiners ask of higher level work: "does this candidate really understand the scope and potential of the question?"

January 2011

January 2010

May 2010

June 2009

UK Tribes

Groupthink

Being PC in this day and age

Jeremy Clarkson, Ricky Gervais and Andy Gray have all paid the price for causing offence. But are their comments any different from the merciless banter heard on the street every day?

In 2011, political correctness finally went mad. Really mad. It got angry with Ricky Gervais for using the word "mong"; it shouted at Jeremy Clarkson for saying that strikers should be shot; it had Andy Gray and Richard Keys sacked from Sky for being sexist about female match officials; it forced Ofcom to censure Frankie Boyle for his jokes about Jordan's disabled son. Maybe mad is the wrong word. PC got hardcore.

Berating people for revealing private prejudices in public, for picking on someone less than their own size, for making out-of-order gags… PC became so central to the nation's conversation with itself that I started collecting articles. Such as: "White officers sue Met for 'racism'" (they were charged, then cleared of race-related offences, and sued the Met for compensation). Lots of pieces on how Christianity is under threat from PC, or whether a comedian's joke is "bad taste". Blogs and counter blogs about how women are represented in computer games, whether on-pitch slagging between football players should be legally monitored. Many articles linked the BBC with political correctness – the furore about the Beeb proposing to stop the use of BC and AD (overly PC); the fuss about the lack of females on the shortlist for Sports Personality of the Year (not PC enough).

Read the full Guardian article here.

Mystery Chinese blogger scores a hit with Cultural Revolution novel

Under The Hawthorn Tree has already sold more than a million copies in China alone.

A novel by an anonymous Chinese author living in America, which started life as a blog, has become a worldwide publishing sensation. It has been snapped up by publishers in 15 countries who have been impressed by the fact that it has sold more than a million copies in China and inspired a film by an Oscar-winning Chinese director. Some publishers even bought it before reading a translation. Yet none of the publishers, translators or editors knows the author's identity.

Under the Hawthorn Tree, a tragic love story set during the Cultural Revolution, is written under the pen name of Ai Mi. All that is known about the author is that she leads a reclusive life in Florida, having gone there to study. She is thought to be in her fifties or sixties, if only because her insight into the Cultural Revolution suggests someone who experienced first hand the political and social persecution of Mao Zedong's last decade. She tells her readers that it was inspired by a true story. Her central character – a young woman from a "politically questionable family" who falls in love with the son of a general – is based on a real person with names and places disguised.

The film version, directed by Zhang Yimou, the director of 'House of Flying Daggers', will be released in Britain at a later date.

Read the full article here.

High Culture and Popular Culture

There are lots of different ideas and definitions of these two terms - you will be expected to explore them and provide examples of them in your work and examination answers.

Popular culture would include most forms of mass communication or commercial forms of art such as pop and rock music, TV soap operas, romance stories, blockbuster films, tabloid newspapers etc.

High culture would include classical music, documentary, serious novels, avant-garde or experimental films, broadsheet newspapers, great art such as Van Gogh, Rembrandt etc

We should be interested in this distinction because certain theoretical groups such as Marxists and Feminists see popular culture as either big business (or the ruling classes) making money out of us and keeping us happy or in the case of feminists, exploiting us for money.

High culture, on the other hand, is seen as pure art, an expression of individual but universal ideas being communicated to other individuals who appreciate and interpret these pieces of art - stories, paintings, films - in their own, unique way. High culture can also be a force for oppression because it is held up as the model all cultural artefacts and art should aspire to.

Re-posted from: communicationandculture.co.uk

Definitions of Culture

What is culture? Try writing a definition for yourself.
 Now read the definitions below. Which ones do you agree with? Which ones do you disagree with and why?

"Culture used to be so simple. Culture use to mean art, literature, and ideas. And not just any old art, literature, and ideas. Culture was High Art, Great Literature, and Big Ideas. And more particularly, our High Art, Great Literature, and Big Ideas."

"Culture is a collection of beliefs, values and ways of doing things which are typical of a particular community and which are expressed and perpetuated through various codes"

"Culture - a particular way of life which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and literature, but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour"

"Culture. the best that has been thought and said in the world"

"Culture is the constant process of producing meanings for and from our social experience"

"It's alleged by the media - and our culture - are "dumbing down", abandoning brain for sentiment, rigour for raucousness, standards for commercial success."

"Mass culture is very, very democratic: it absolutely refuses to discriminate against, or between, anything or anybody."

"The cultural order of our day still tells us that Schoenberg is superior to Presley; many people go along with that."

Re-posted from: communicationandculture.co.uk