WELCOME

Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Conversation Beyond the Classroom”! The title of this blog refers to the community of active readers & collaborative learners we are creating by sharing our academic writing for Eng 100 with each other + a larger group of students, instructors, academics, and just about anybody who chooses to follow our blog! When you write and post your reader responses here (and, later, as you write your essays for the course), I encourage you to use this audience to conceptualize who you are writing for and, most important, how to communicate your ideas so that this group of academic readers and writers can easily follow your line of thinking. Think about it this way: What do you need to explain and articulate in order for the other bloggers to understand your response to the essays we’ve read in class? What does your audience need to know about those essays and the authors who wrote them? And how can you show your readers, in writing, which ideas you add to these “conversations” that take place in the texts we study?
As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! I encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later…).
Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. We hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it! I am really excited see how far we can take this together!


--Mary Hammerbeck, Instructor of Eng 100

Friday, February 18, 2011

American Culture Brought To You by Corporate America

American Culture Brought To You by Corporate America

In Robert Scholes, “On Reading a Video Text,” he describes how our culture and our perception of America have shaped through advertiser’s skillful manipulation.
Scholes describes how media has skillfully shaped our American consciousness by reinforcing a cultural ideology based on “Myth” and not reality.

He demonstrates how commercials hook us within a few short seconds by using their acute understanding of our human emotions. Manipulating our unconscious mind with technical skills and exploiting visual images, music, voice over narration, Scholes says advertisers can create an entire life story.

I feel this is cultural hypnosis at its best. Media appeals to us with these powerful visual messages that makes us highly suggestible and pulls us in limiting our field of consciousness by fixing our attention to what their selling be it an idea or an outright product. Advertisers zone in on our actual human nature altering our sense of identity and conformity to their will.

Once Scholes has us understanding how media works he then explains that, “In this age of massive manipulation and disinformation, criticism is the only way we have of taking something seriously. The greatest patriots of our time will be those who explore our ideology critically, with particular attention to the gaps between mythology and practice.”

Educating ourselves and our children to the realization that media does not always have our best interests at heart and becoming more decisive critical thinkers to discern between ideology and myth in America.
Posted by at

2 comments:

  1. morgan.englandFebruary 18, 2011 at 11:45 AM

    I like your take on the fact Scholes writes about how commercials or just text video messages links into us to make us want to buy their product without really trying. Scholes really expanded on advertisments and how they engage to our minds especially when stretching out a twenty-eight second commercial. Good Job :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. DcarlsonFebruary 18, 2011 at 11:46 AM

    That was an excellent evaluation of the article. I liked how you explained that media has shaped the American consciousness by reinforcing myth instead of reality. This is very true and the solution to the problem as you said is to step away from the trance of entertainment or "bread and circus" and take a serious look at all media not just commercials. When we take media at face value and just have fun with it we have no chance to figure out the true meaning and the hidden propaganda. However if we have the discipline to do some work we can take some time to analyze media and figure out the agendas to decide if they are good or bad and wether we really like it or not.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)