I signed up for “Media 486: Popular Culture” because some my friends were in it and they made it sound fun and interesting. Although it was not what I had expected, I am glad that I enrolled in this course.
My original expectation had been that we would be talking about more modern media and less about the history of popular culture. I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed at first, but by the end of the class the material we covered and the order in which we learned it made a lot of sense.
One thing I learned from this experience is to be more analytical about the media that I intake. Before I took this class I mostly just viewed media as entertainment without reading into some of the deep messages being portrayed subliminally.
The blog that I think showcases my best work is “That 70s Mom.” In class, we were discussing motherhood in television and film when the “That 70s Show” mother, Kitty Forman popped into my head. In early television mothers were portrayed as perfect and this bothers me. I love how Kitty in “That 70s Show” is a great working mother although she is quite crazy and addicted to alcohol. I think this is one of my best blogs because the issue really hits home with me as a woman. Why can men in television have issues but females are pressured into appearing flawless? I enjoyed discussing and expanding on this topic because it really made me think.
One of my weakest posts is probably “Pigs didn’t start the Swine Flu!” Although the video I used is a quite popular meme, I believe that my argument was weak. I think I was running out of ideas for things to blog about when I wrote this. I used Steven Johnson’s book, “Everything Bad is Good For You” to discuss how Pop Culture is actually making us smarter. If I were to improve this post, I would have expanded further and gone into more detail about how the swine flu pig is somewhat educating.
If I were to do anything different about these assignments, I would have forced myself into posting twice a week instead of leaving most of my blogs and comments until the end of the quarter to complete when all my other classes are assigning final projects, too.
In conclusion, I am glad that I took Pop Culture. It was not what I had expected at all, but I can use and apply the concepts and ways of thinking about media to my other media classes and my future career in video production.
