Congratulations to our recent graduates - Wong Jing Han, Lim Wei Yang, Alex Teh and Lim Rong Shan whose final year project was repackaged as a Saturday Special Report in The Straits Times! The FYP was about one-room rental housing in Singapore, focusing on Block 2 at Jalan Kukoh.
Started in 2002, Month of Photography Asia is an annual exhibition presenting works by international and Singaporean photographers in accordance to the theme for the year. The theme for this year is “Engaging Asia”, with talks and workshops given by lensman Steve McCurry who is world-renowned for his picture “Afghan Girl”:
The exhibitions will run from 18 June to 18 July at the following places: Asian Civilisations Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art at the Lasalle-College of the Arts , SMU Gallery, SG Private Banking Gallery at the Alliance Francaise de Singapour and The Cathay Gallery.
George Gerbner (1919 - 2005) was considered a seminal thinker in the area of television studies.
He worked as a professor and researcher at the Institute for Communications Research at the University of Illinois from 1956 until 1964. He went on to teach at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and stayed till 1990. In 1990, he founded the Cultural Environment Movement, an advocacy group working for greater diversity in media.
He passed away on 24 December 2005 but left a lasting legacy.
He said that people are no longer learning about their cultural identity from their families and communities but from “a handful of conglomerates who have something to sell.” No doubt he was referring to the television networks.
He was concerned with the “mean world syndrome“, a phrase he coined which refers to “a phenomenon in which people who watch large amounts of television are more likely to believe that the world is an unforgiving and frightening place“.
Fearful people, he postulated, are more easily manipulated and controlled to accept or even welcome repression in order to ease their insecurities.
He founded the Cultural Indicators Research Project in 1968 to track changes in television content. It also analyzes how those changes affect viewers’ perceptions of the world.
Take a deeper look at George Gerbner and his thoughts about television with these 3 AV titles available at ACRC. Excerpts taken from Media Education Foundation:
The Electronic Storyteller
Gerbner outlines, in a comprehensive and clear fashion, the way in which the universal storytelling function of human societies has been colonized by corporate media in the modern world. Making a distinction between “effect” and his own theory of “cultivation,” he explains the role the media environment plays in how we think about ourselves and the way the world works.
In contrast to the relatively simplistic behaviorist model that media violence causes real-world violence, Gerbner encourages us to think about the psychological, political, social and developmental impacts of growing up and living within a cultural environment of pervasive, ritualized violent images.
Call No. F511099 [VIDEOTAPE]
The Crisis of the Cultural Environment
Gerbner delivers a stinging indictment of the early construction of the “information superhighway,” sharing his predictions, based in the logic of globalization, of what he thought would become of the Internet and other new media.
An interesting article about Kindle in the New York Times:
Most arguments for or against Kindle (and other electronic reading devices) revolves around the user’s reading experience.
The argument of this article, however, revolves around the book as an object in everyday life. It argues that we use it, just like other types of status symbols, to size people up. In the writer’s own words, “judge people by the covers of their books“.
When we see someone driving a Porsche, we instantly associate the person with wealth. So what happens when we see someone reading a particular book? It was an interesting perspective on the staying power of the printed book.
Do I “judge people by the covers of their books?
When I see a person reading a book on the MRT, I instinctively try to check out the title. I believe I do form a first impression of the person by the book he or she is reading. If it is a book I personally like, I would immediately feel an affinity towards that person.
When I am reading on the MRT, I try to hide the book cover I am reading to prevent others from finding out what I am reading and forming any impression of me. It is safer to be blank and unknowable (at least that’s how I feel).
I think less and less people are reading. There are so many distractions and things to see and hear that quiet reading has become less popular and palatable. Why read when you can watch or listen? Someone I know once said that reading is like work and it requires effort. He prefers audio books.
I am reading less and less too. That book must be really good before I am willing to invest the time. But it is hard to judge whether something is worth the while or not. Not even those on the Booker Prize list.
Perhaps it is really not about Book Versus Kindle, but Book/Kindle Versus Everything Else.
When French composer Maurice Jarre passed away on 28th March, sociology student Shane Fitzgerald took the opportunity to test “how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news”. He amended the composer’s Wikipedia page with a fake quote which was used by many newspapers and new blogs all over the world. No one called his bluff till he announced it a month later, showing that media outlets are often reliant on Internet sources to produce news stories quickly under pressure.
Read more about it here. A lesson for aspiring journalists to always double check their sources!
