Film, New Media, & Culture
Her Film Analysis
The Smartphone Paradox
Marvel App Project
Technology Mindfulness Project
New Media Introduction
The Internet Debate
Realist Approach: How a film represents reality. Discusses cinematic techniques and how they represent the reality the filmmaker wants the audience to experience (insanity, love, panic, etc.)
Contextualist Approach: Considers the film as part of a broader context. The particular time, place in society that influenced this film. Includes sub-criticisms such as Feminist, Marxist, or Dualist.
Formalist Approach: Examines the narrative structure and form of the film (characters, plot, development, mise-en-scene). Discusses. the effects of techniques (camera angle, cinematography, editing, sound) on the viewer.
After monitoring my usage for the past semester, I have reached the conclusion that I am on my phone in terms of screen time a lot more than I anticipated. I always knew I was dependent on it because I use it constantly not just for social media and keeping up with my friends, but for my education and for my college softball team. I have definitely become more mindful of my usage but I am not sure that it will have a significant impact on my social, professional, and academic life. I will definitely continue to use it in my academic and professional life as I have no other choice and even use it it my social life.
I do plan to be more mindful on my usage in terms of social media because I want to limit things that don’t allow me to be more productive and clearly from tracking my usage I am on it a majority of the time on Snapchat and my most used category is social networking. Moving forward, I will continue to set time limits on certain apps and turn off my phone when I go to bed each night in order to better regulate my device usage.
Technological Views
Technology Determinism: Wikipedia defines the term technological determinism as a, “reductionist theory that assumes that a society’s technology determines the development of its social structure and cultural values” (par. 1). In today’s world, I believe that a majority of people would easily agree with that statement. However, it is crazy to think about how intertwined technology and media are in our society and the general public does not realize how large a part technology plays in our everyday lives. Wikipedia writes that technological determinism, “seeks to show technical developments, media, or technology as a whole, as the key mover in history and social change…it is a theory subscribed by ‘hyperglobalists’ who claim that as a consequence of the wide availability of technology, accelerated globalization is inevitable” (par. 5).
Shaping of Technologies: The article, Shaping of Technologies, goes directly against the idea of technological determinism. Technological determinisms’ main critiques that are brought up in the first paragraph of this article is the idea that, “it subverts the role of human agency to that of technologies” (Wei, par.1) Wei quotes, “it focuses our minds on how to adapt to technological change, not on how to shape it” (Mackenzie & Wajcman, 1999).
The idea being that anything that makes it onto the internet or into the media is going to be there forever. Whether we like it or not, each and every one of us has a digital footprint with whatever we have put into the world and it is our duty as being part of this world to not let new media ruin things. By ruin things I mean, take our privacy or falsify and publish information that’s not true, or anything else. New media isn’t bad but it can be used as a weapon and not for good.
Socha and Eber-Schmid note that, “the definition of new media changes daily and will continue to do so…what it will be tomorrow is virtually unpredictable for most of us, but we do know that it will continue to evolve in fast and furious ways”
"The Smartphone Paradox is a critical examination of our everyday mobile technologies and the effects that they have on our thoughts and behaviors. Alan J. Reid presents a comprehensive view of smartphones: the research behind the uses and gratifications of smartphones, the obstacles they present, the opportunities they afford, and how everyone can achieve a healthy, technological balance. It includes interviews with smartphone users from a variety of backgrounds, and translates scholarly research into a conversational tone, making it easy to understand a synthesis of key findings and conclusions from a heavily-researched domain. All in all, through the lens of smartphone dependency, the book makes the argument for digital mindfulness in a device age that threatens our privacy, sociability, attention, and cognitive abilities."
This was a book we read, reflected, and had video discussions about throughout the semester in order to tie in all the topics and readings throughout the week and look at the bigger picture of it all.
Meditation Exercises
I created a Virtual CINO card app which allows students to use their CINO card through their phone so that it didn't have to be carried on them the entire time. You could get into dining halls, athletic events, get coupons, pay bills, etc.
This was a project asking us to design an app specifically for Coastal Carolina students to aid in our everyday lives.
In Does the internet make you dumber, Carr retells multiples studies in which technology was either used or not and the results depicted all the same trends. In students, when computers and web surfing were allowed, the students who did use their computers were more distracted and scored lower on exams generally. Carr notes, “When we're constantly distracted and interrupted, as we tend to be online, our brains are unable to forge the strong and expansive neural connections that give depth and distinctiveness to our thinking. We become mere signal-processing units, quickly shepherding disjointed bits of information into and then out of short-term memory” (1).
Poundstone writes, “Today’s mediascape does not provide much guidance. It encourages us to create personal, solipsistic filters over information, making it unprecedentedly easy to gorge on news of favorite celebrities, TV shows, teams, political ideologies, and tech toys” (3). Once again, it is up to us to be informed and about relevant, helpful, useful, truthful, and productive information.
In Does the internet make you smarter Shrinky highlights the idea there is an abundance of information that is available on the internet and every day, the scope of information gets broader and broader. When it is easy to simply highlight the consequences of our ongoing dependency on technology, the positives are often forgotten. Shrinky shows the good it can accomplish by noting, “open source software, created without managerial control of the workers or ownership of the product, has been critical to the spread of the Web. Searches for everything from supernovae to prime numbers now happen as giant, distributed efforts.
Throughout the course we were given links to various meditation exercises, some involving our phone and some not in order to be more aware of our minds, our bodies, and our relationship/connection with technology.