Final Project

For my final project, I want to take concepts we talked about in class and turn it into a visual, interactive narrative by making a website on wix.com.  I want to use pictures that either I'm going to make in Photoshop or am going to find on flickr through creative commons licenses.  I want to talk about how words have been given different meanings over the years (obviously black people don't have black skin) and about how stereotypes are even carried onto the online world, where women are given preferential treatment even though other users have no idea whether the person playing is actually female or not.  I think it's interesting how in cyberspace, things like race, class, gender and sexuality don't have to matter, but we still tend to carry stereotypes from the real world online.  From there, I'm going to see where it takes me, I'd maybe like to talk about separation of church and state and how that's obviously not the case concerning issues like gay marriage.  I'd like your feedback if you have any, but obviously I don't have a really concrete idea of what I'm going to do yet.

World of Warcraft

While I'm sure there is racism and sexism in World of Warcraft, most of what I observed seemed to be related to class if you define class as how far advanced different players are.  There was not too much going on when I was in the city, but there was some trash talk, and overall people don't seem to be very nice to new players.  If you ask a question, you'll probably get an answer but you might have to take a lot of shit in the process.  I feel like racism becomes present as you get further into the game then I did from one day because I'm sure there are different characters that are considered better than others in one way or another and the game is pretty much set up to encourage some sort of racism by making two sides.  It's interesting because you'd think online games would have the option to make something that wasn't racist or sexist, but it seems like World of Warcraft does the opposite between the sexualization of female characters and the two different sides and the different characters.

I saw this ad the other day and it made me wonder what race the hamsters were supposed to be because I feel like they were supposed to be representing a certain race.  Furthermore, it made me wonder what affect taking people out of ads has similar to video games where people are represented by avatars that can look and be nothing like them.

Week 3: Reflections

So far this class has been really interesting.  I feel like I've learned more about how to look at situations considering a panopticon and I've heard a couple of different sides about issues like racism and gender.  I feel like we didn't really get very far in talking about racism, partially because it's such a touchy subject and the class can tell you have a strong opinion on it which probably makes us scared to say anything about it.  I mean, Washington is such a white place and at least for me, I learned about racism in a classroom with a lot of other middle class to priveleged white people which makes talking about it in this class more interesting but so much harder.  I also thought it was interesting how people are so much more willing to discuss gender and furthermore video games because video games are so inoffensive compared to the other topics that we talk about.  I guess I want to continue having discussions about these subjects but maybe there are ways to make it easier for people to talk, which we do with the online chats, but I still feel like some people are hesitant to speak up even in chatrooms.  Anyways, I guess mostly what I have to say is keep doing what we're doing, I don't really have much other feedback and I look forward to whatever we'll be talking about in upcoming weeks.

Week 2

Some of my reflections from this week include:

First of all, I don't really think racism will ever disappear unless we stop having to check what race we are on every college and job application and before every survey you take.  Having to select your race on so many things is making race important.  Using race as a factor in things like college admissions makes race very important, as a white female it was harder for me to get into college than any other group of people because white females do better than any other group of people in high school forcing colleges to admit less of them in attempts to make the school more diverse.  Also, I think that oftentimes we confuse race with culture.  For example, the statement Asians are bad drivers may be considered a racist statement, however after I thought about it, if the person driving learned to drive in a huge, crowded city in China, no wonder they're what Americans consider "bad drivers" they are used to driving under extremely crowded conditions, which makes that statement more about their culture and where they come from than their race.  Also, I think that racism is different between different races depending on how assimilated people of other races become in the United States.  I don't think that people typically see African Americans as not American-it's the black sub culture that people stereotype and attack.  This makes racism against black people different than racism against the stereotypical illegal Mexican immigrant.  A big problem people have with Mexican Americans especially is that their home country is right across the border so they're close to the culture they grew up in, they're not forced to give it up like many Asian immigrants who find it easier to assimilate to what would be considered American culture because they are so far away from their home.  I think this is another factor in why racism against Asians is different and sometimes includes positive stereotypes.  I also was thinking about how I wouldn't really consider Asians a minority in the Pacific Northwest, I mean UW is now mostly Asian students which could also make racism against Asians different in this part of the country.

When it comes to movies, I really don't like the majority of Sci Fi films and I'm not interested in futuristic media or gaming so I don't have many examples that come from that, however your mention of Joss Whedon during lecture made me think of TV and how none of his TV shows really have diversity-Buffy was pretty much full of white people too.  This also made me think of other shows on tv now and how oftentimes they're almost over diversified, like Grey's Anatomy.  If you walk into a hospital in Seattle, it's highly unlikely that there would be as many non white doctors as there are in the show and there would probable be more Asians.  However, at least when I watch the show, it's not something that I noticed beyond the first episode which brings to mind something one of my high school teachers said about Shakespeare which is that race doesn't matter in theatre.  We had just watched a movie where Denzel Washington played a white man's brother.  Also, when you talked about Asians not being portrayed as heroes it made me think of two things-one, that there's an Asian character in Heroes (or there was I haven't seen any recent episodes of the show) and two, that the United States has basically kicked Asia's ass on a number of occasions, most importantly WWII and before the US was dominant, England pretty much kicked everyone's ass.  I think that it has more to do with history than racism.  Elsewhere in TV, there's Greek which has Calvin, the black, gay, fraternity brother.  Also, your discussion of science and the arts not getting along reminded me a lot of Bones which has a lot of non-white (and also not clearly any other race) characters and also often talks about the differences between Anthropology and Psychology, which the main character as an Anthropologist, rejects throughout the first season because it's not a real Science.  I guess basically what I'm saying is there are a lot of examples on TV of exactly what you're talking about and also I think shows like Grey's Anatomy show that racism is slowly going away, I mean it will never completely be gone, but I think many of the characters are cast because they are good actors not necessarily because of their race.  I think it's unlikely that race will go away for hundreds and hundreds of years if ever-I mean you talked about how you hung out with other Natives, people of other races tend to hang out with each other (that doesn't mean that they don't hang out with people of other races, but you see a lot of people hanging out with and marrying their own race).  Even though mixed race relationships are no longer frowned upon by the majority, I think it will be a long time before that will be the norm.  However, I do think racism, at least in the huge examples we think of in history, will go away.  Stereotypes will always be there, but I think eventually racism will be much less prevalent, think of how much less racism there is now than there was 60 years ago.  Then again, I should consider how I'm from the Northwest and racism is a lot less common here than it is in the South, but still, I think progress is being made.

Sorry I feel like that ended up being really long but I wasn't really sure what to blog about so that's what I came up with!

Week 1-Foucault's Panopticism and Southland Tales

Despite the fact that this is the second or third time I've read Foucault's panopticism, I still don't really see what it has to do with digital media and culture today.  We read Foucault in DTC 355 as well, so it must have something to do with it, I guess I just don't really get it yet.  In modern times, surveillance seems to be a result of panopticism, as well as the structure of schools, prisons, etc.  People in general seem to think that panopticism is a bad thing, but I think that letting people do what they want wouldn't work, kind of like what happened with communism.  I feel like you can't really count on people to do anything outside of their own personal benefit without someone enforcing it.  If schools weren't structured, people wouldn't go to school.  My high school was an experimental school in the 1970s when it was built, and originally, it had no walls.  It also had outdoor areas where classes were held.  However, attendance wasn't required and in the end the different school design was a failure.


I believe an example of panopticism in Southland Tales is US IDent which uses surveillance to keep track of all the citizens.  Also, I think the neo-marxist movement is an example of what happens when someone tries to break out of the panopticon, similar to the experimental school structure from the 70s.  However, the neo-marxist's attempts to break out are all observed, so in a way it's a failure.  Venice Beach seemed like an odd place to set the film because I've been there and it doesn't really seem like the place for a rebel movement to be housed.  Maybe there's some symbolic meaning to that as well.  We didn't quite finish the movie so I'm not sure how it ends, but that's what I could relate to panopticism so far!