short paper
Length: 400-500 Words, double-spaced.
Please submit your papers electronically.
[Please respond to all 3 prompts.]
1. Referring to the following pages in Baudrillard’s “Mass Media Culture,” please discuss what “cool” might mean in relation to his ideas about “cultural recycling”(p. 100-102), and consumption as responding to a quiz question (p. 105). (100 words)
2. Choose ONE of the characters from the film, I’m a Cyborg but That’s Okay, and discuss and analyze him or her in relation to Harraway’s notion of “posthumanism” in her article, i.e., the continuum between the human and the machine and between the human and the animal. (e.g., Young-Goon, Il-soon, Young-Goon’s grandmother, or any of the other characters in the psychiatric hospital.) Put another way, how would you imagine the notion of posthumanism help the character you’ve chosen to analyze to feel that he or she is okay, though he or she is a machine or an animal? (200 words)
3. Please discuss A and B separately. You don’t need to connect them in your response.
A) Using Richard Dyer’s notion of “stereotyping through iconography,” discuss, in the documentary, Koryo Saram: the Unreliable People, how the mainstream Soviet propaganda films used iconographic images of hardworking Koreans and produce a “positive” stereotype of an ethnic minority group. How do the characters and their memories of the community’s history in the documentary counter or contradict these images? (100 words)
prompt_1_baudrillard_mass_media_culture
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Response
- Referring to the following pages in Baudrillard’s “Mass Media Culture,” please discuss what “cool” might mean in relation to his ideas about “cultural recycling”(p. 100-102), and consumption as responding to a quiz question (p. 105). (100 words)
According to Baudrillard’s Mass culture media culture, cool in modern society means an individual who is up to speed with the changes around their environment. That notion of coolness has created an overall cloud of unconscious social constraint with regards to not only fashion but also consumption. Likewise, individuals possessing given skillsets in places of work must either update their expertise or risk falling behind the pecking order (Baudrillard, 2019). As a result, persons who do not consume certain types of products most notably fashion wise are deemed as uncool for the society
(862 words)