One of the first assessments in our popular culture course started off as blogging and v-logs. Also relating to week 12 lectorial here. Focusing my idea on social networking and smartphone technologies, I did my video log based on a satire written in the past as a high school activity:

I love my IPhone 4s.

Its plain white colour, silver bitten apple logo on its back, its long touchable screen and soft slippery textured round button below its screen I have pressed 12 trillion times… Maybe more. Continue reading →

Here are some of the ideas that Daniel discuss in our week 12 lectorial (Yayy! last lectorial of the semester):

• Technological determinism is a valid way of looking at the world
• Humanity is in charge of its own future
• Innovation and progress is hindered by scientific regulation
• Machines are becoming too intuitive/intelligent
• Dust has negligible matter, but it has great power

Focusing on dust and its negligible matter, technological inventions has been assembled with these materials taken from our earth. Hence, it has great power in the world of technological determination and innovations, encouraging us the reliance to these resources. “…allowed dust to do the work: a temporal, slow compiling by the non-human particles as a work of art installed at the museum, ‘a purposeful inactivity'” (Parikka 2013). Obsession with resources, with what we take from the earth not only significantly build a constant progression but we also need to think about the people who literally obtain these resources from the mine. They are the ones breathing the dust into their lungs, having to live with the consequences of their own health. These people may have been the ones collecting materials for the consumers’ media materialism such as having an iPhone, computers and etc. Likewise, our planet itself is affected while geologists study and examine how the planet works and our impact on it. We’ve all heard of the global political issue; the climate change, the ‘dying planet’. See dust is only wall few materials but as obsession with collecting these resources occur, it has an enormous power in the impact of our earth and on us as ones living within.

There comes a final assessment in the popular culture course and there comes another annotated bibliography like the one we did in media 1 project brief 4. The references I am using are the articles read for my group presentation on feminism in music videos, an article of the Simpsons and on social media. Writing 1,500 words summary for three references is definitely not an easy one. Let alone this assessment worths 50% of the whole course. But I guess being in the habit of “critically analysing” texts is crucial for the rest of your life unless you don’t mind being somewhat unreliable. Though I’m grateful having learned this skill, while it helps to investigate and study the artefacts of popular culture across times in which I am looking forward to.