Monday, 26 March 2012

Facebook's 'dark side': study finds link to socially aggressive narcissism



Researchers have established a direct link between the number of friends you have on Facebook and the degree to which you are a "socially disruptive" narcissist, confirming the conclusions of many social media sceptics.
People who score highly on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory questionnaire had more friends on Facebook, tagged themselves more often and updated their newsfeeds more regularly.
The research comes amid increasing evidence that young people are becoming increasingly narcissistic, and obsessed with self-image and shallow friendships.
The latest study, published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, also found that narcissists responded more aggressively to derogatory comments made about them on the social networking site's public walls and changed their profile pictures more often.
A number of previous studies have linked narcissism with Facebook use, but this is some of the first evidence of a direct relationship between Facebook friends and the most "toxic" elements of narcissistic personality disorder.
Full article: guardian.co.uk

Wednesday, 21 March 2012

PopCult Mag: Online Magazine (Ideas)

Click above to visit site
PopCult is an on-line magazine simply dedicated to pop culture. It is worth a look to get some solid discussion of contemporary artefacts and issues as, for the most part, other magazines are writing about entertainment products, not necessarily "culture." What you typically get in the regular press are articles interviewing celebrities who just happen to be selling something: a new movie, a new CD, a new TV show, or just their own fabulousness. Consequently, most of the media that's described as being about "pop culture" is really about the personalities of famous people.

What comes across in PopCult is a genuine love and interest in popular culture, left-field arts, personal obsessions and a site that actually believes in what it writes about.


Featured Article
Click above to read full article

Extract:
Take a look at your local newsstand and here's what you'll see: racks upon racks of magazines that look almost identical. Whether they focus on music, fashion, cigars, fitness, women, or men, most magazines typically feature a grinning celebrity on the cover peeking out from behind squadrons of coverlines. It wasn't always like this.
From the "golden age" of magazine popularity in the 1920s-'30s and on through to the early '60s, even the most mainstream of magazines tried to lure in readers with distinctive design, original typography, and striking artwork. The cover was considered a canvas–rather than merely a billboard–by groundbreaking art directors like Mehemed Fehmy Agha (Vogue, House & Garden, Vanity Fair), Alexey Brodovitch (Harper's Bazaar), and Eleanor Treacy and Francis Brennan (Fortune). These and other designers of that era transformed magazines into works of art in themselves.

Friday, 16 March 2012

Off Book: Book Art

Books are in a conflicted state. Should they still exist in a digital era? Will they all be replaced by Kindles and Nooks? These questions dominate the discussion of books in our time. A select group of artists, who use books as their medium, engage this discussion from another angle. From pop culture pop-ups, to surreal sculptural stories, to reformations of antique sacred texts, these creators re-envision what the experience of a book can be. At times playful, and other times profound, this episode explores the boundaries of one of the most important human creations.

Thursday, 15 March 2012

Off Book: Visual Culture Online


For decades now, people have joined together online to communicate and collaborate around interesting imagery. In recent years, the pace and intensity of this activity has reached a fever pitch. With countless communities engaging in a constant exchange, building on each others’ work, and producing a prodigious flow of material, we may be experiencing the early stages of a new type of artistic and cultural collaboration. In this episode of Off Book, we’ll speak with a number of Internet experts and artists who'll give us an introductory look into this intriguing new world.

One Fanboy’s Quest to Be Drawn Into as Many Comic Books as Possible


Superhero fanboys lead vicarious lives. Some trudge through conventions with knives made of spray-painted cardboard taped to their knuckles. Others, like masked crusader Phoenix Jones, bust Seattle carjackers. But sometimes wearing orange foam bricks and growling, “It’s clobberin’ time!” just doesn’t scratch the itch. Enter Jeff Johnson. Popping up in nearly 30 comic books, he has become the industry’s Waldo—a lurking stowaway who has managed to hijack the unlikeliest panels.

“It’s the ultimate bragging right to go into a comic store and pick up a book you’re in,” says Johnson, a 30-year-old Kmart electronics clerk from Leavenworth, Kansas. His infamous glasses-and-goatee mug has been zombiefied (The Walking Dead), digitized (Tron: Betrayal), and placed alongside Sinestro (Green Lantern Corps), thanks to his ceaseless lobbying and the cooperation of artists. The project, tracked on his blog, DrawMeIn.com, has brought no money (“I don’t think the publishers are aware of what I’m doing,” he says) but plenty of nerd acclaim. The idea sprang from a 2006 FHM contest in which entrants sent pictures of themselves in homemade costumes of villains; the winner (if you want to call it that) was drawn into Ultimate X-Men. Johnson didn’t want to dress up, so instead he handed out DrawMeIn flyers at Comic-Con, after which penciler Ryan Ottley worked him into Invincible.

Today the cameos keep rolling—eagle-eyed readers can expect to see Johnson this spring in Image Comic’s Near Death and Paul Cornell’s Saucer Country. And while he’s got his eye on an even 50 books, he maintains that it’s about quality, not quantity: “I’m pretty sure Stan Lee has an edge on me.” For now, at least.


Wired.com: 28/2/12

Charlie Brooker explains the 'phenomenon' of Invisible Children video Kony 2012


The Kony 2012 video, released online last week, has been watched nearly 76m times on YouTube, prompting not only a media sensation but speculation over the organisation’s background and profile.

Tuesday, 13 March 2012

The Pink and Blue Project

Children of all ages are hooked on pink and blue, a trend ensured by parents who begin collecting for sons and daughters when they are infants. JeongMee Yoon's playful photographic project "The Pink and Blue Project" highlights both gender and culture by having infants pose with their favorite belongings, including JeongMee's own daughter Seowoo, pictured above.

Monday, 12 March 2012

Gillian Wearing

Gillian Wearing is a Birmingham born artist whose films and photographs explore people's public faces and private lives. She draws on fly-on-the-wall documentaries, reality TV and the techniques of theatre, to explore how we present ourselves to the world. Her photographic portraits and mini-dramas show that, given the chance to dress up, put on a mask or act out a role, can allow us to be more truly ourselves. She has a retrospective show at The Whitechapel Gallery which starts on March 28th.

Here is a short slide presentation made about her work.

Saturday, 10 March 2012

Wonder Women! Searches for Pop Culture’s Heroines


Katie Pineda, a young girl who appears in Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines, will teach viewers a lesson about comics that few others could.

An avid fan of comic books, Katie can talk about her favorites at length. Despite the occasional stammer, she is incredibly well-spoken for a fourth grader. But speaking isn’t how she teaches. What we learn from Katie is through her favorite character: Wonder Woman. And what we learn is that she probably idolizes the DC Comics character because, frankly, there aren’t nearly enough superheroines worth emulating.

“I just thought, ‘[Wonder Woman is] important in all these different moments historically, and wouldn’t it be interesting to hang up a larger dialog about women as heroes and women represented in popular culture and use her as a vehicle to guide that?’” Wonder Women! director Kristy Guevara-Flanigan said in an interview with Wired.

The fact that there aren’t many female heroes in comic books isn’t that shocking — comics have always been something of a sausagefest — but what seems to be overlooked is girls like Katie, one of many young women who would love a few more heroines to look up to. And, as this documentary shows, Wonder Woman has had such an impact since her creation in the early 1940s — from inspiring Rosie the Riveters to Riot Grrrls — that she herself deserves more credit than she gets.

Wonder Women!, which premieres Saturday at the South by Southwest Film festival, was originally conceived after Guevara-Flanigan — whose day job is teaching film at Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area — saw an article about Gail Simone, the first female ongoing writer for the comic from 2007 to 2010.

What the director found as she started digging was that Wonder Woman’s original incarnation, as created by William Moulton Marston in 1941, was a very feminist character that became fairly milquetoast during the more conservative post-World War II era, only to be revived and embraced during the Second Wave Feminist movement (the first cover of Ms. magazine featured an image of the heroine with the line “Wonder Woman for President”).

Guevara-Flanigan’s documentary traces how Wonder Woman’s presence influenced the Riot Grrrl political punk movement of the 1990s — Bikini Kill and Le Tigre frontwoman Kathleen Hanna trashing of the Spice Girls’ embrace of “Girl Power” is particularly phenomenal — and also puts in stark contrast the fact that so many women in the 20th century looked up to Wonder Woman because there really weren’t many other characters on which they could train their admiration.

“I think when you’re little, and looking at people’s knees, you’re so powerless and so unequal that it’s really helpful to be able to think yourself into someone who is powerful,” Ms. magazine co-founder Gloria Steinem says in the film. “Even more powerful than grown-ups.”

Drawing on input from other feminist thinkers, comic book scholars and fans at New York Comic Con (as well as Katie Pineda), Wonder Women! turns what could’ve just been a flat history of a comic book character into a brief study of female empowerment in the last century. This is especially clear in a vignette with a young single mother, who serves as the narrative’s real-world superhero (complete with Wonder Woman tattoo).

In 2010, social sciences scholar Kathryn Gilpatric — a subject of the film — did a study or 157 female action characters and found that half were evil characters, doomed to death. Another 30 percent that weren’t villains were killed off, dying in self-sacrifice (think Trinity in The Matrix trilogy, Phoenix in X-Men: The Last Stand).

The documentary doesn’t end on a downer. In a brief montage, we are reminded that in recent years new heroines have risen out of Phoenix’s ashes, so to speak. Lisbeth Salander has proven hacking (among other tools of vengeance) can enable a whole new kind of justice in the The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo book and films. Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games will soon show theater audiences just how revolutionary female self-preservation can be.

“Not all superheroes have powers, like, most of them are just regular people, but they became something more, and that’s how they inspire me,” she says in the film. “Sometimes I get picked on at school but I just tell myself, ‘Keep going, keep going, you’re going to be more.’ Because some day they’re going to be wishing that they treated me better.”

Edited from: Wired.com

Taste: Cultural Products

Value & Cultural Products

Useful Notes: Role Models/Identity


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Celebrity: facing your fifteen minutes of fame


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Sunday, 4 March 2012

Section B: Presentation (Sample Titles)



Sample Titles for COMM2
Communication and Culture: Unit 2
Section B: Presentation 

This is not directly related to Site A or Site B topics, however, candidates must address both the personal and the cultural within this audio/visual presentation. The specification states that the purpose of the presentation is to consider the ‘struggle’ between ‘who we want to be and who we are allowed to be.’ Best responses considered this conflict through close examination of two of the four key concepts and once selected these should drive the direction of the argument presented. Furthermore personal identity is considered through the cultural practices which bear down on it.

Possible titles with two key concepts explored.

1. Aston Villa and me.
Identity and Representation

2. Eating disorders and me.
Identity and Power

3. Me and my guitar.
Identity and representation

4. Me and my little black dress.
Identity and representation

5. Me as a piano player.
Identity and value

6. Me and gaming.
Identity and representation

7. Me and my Hijab.
Identity and representation

8. Me and my role in a Muslim household.
Identity and power

9. The Actor in me.
Identity and representation

10. Rugby and me.
Identity and representation


11. Not just a blonde.
Identity and representation

12. Ballet and me.
Identity and value

Friday, 2 March 2012

Culture & Identity: Section A Exploration

Cultural icon Morrissey discusses how the media is obsessed with insignificant issues and fails to make valid critical comments on the state of nation, the august riots, contemporary culture and the current music scene in an interview with clashmusic.com. Read it here.

Watch the video below and consider the cultural implications that the song implies and apply similar principles to your individual tastes:



Ideal Bookshelf

American artist Jane Mount runs a website called Ideal Bookshelf. She creates these personalised illustrations of people's favourite sets of books. How many people are completely honest in their choices? Do they choose the books they really read or those they want other people to believe they read?

Exploration Chosen Topic: Site B

“Every time you move through a built human environment, a trans-formed physical landscape, you are moving through something like a book or text, a collection of signs whose meaning derives from the intentions of those who made the environment what it is and the cultural ideals and ideas that lie behind those intentions. Simply by living in that environment, one learns and absorbs those meanings. One shapes ones life in accordance with the imperatives the landscapes contain.”

Consider this quote in relation to your 1,000 word Exploration and it may help you in analysing your personal cultural experiences.


If discussing Blur's Glastonbury 2009 performance you must consider: the place (environment), the historical implications of the performance (why they did it?) as well as the actual musical performance on the night. Only then can a TRUE interpretation of the cultural significance of the event be fully understood. 

Thursday, 1 March 2012

Gender & Culture



A few interesting gender items popped up on the Film Studies For Free Twitter feed:
  • Louise Wilks ‘”Boys don’t like girls for funniness”: Raunch Culture and the British Tween Film’ – Download
  • Francis Smith on ‘Gender and Class Performativity at the Prom: An Analysis of PRETTY IN PINK’ – Download
  • Networking Knowledge journal online (2011 conference, papers + “Girlhood in Popular Culture” theme) 
Re-posted from: Screenagers.me