If any of you have space in your schedules for next semester... Professor Susan Larsen is offering a class on visual culture in Russia, which will be cross-listed with Media Studies. Not many people registered for this course, which is a shame, because it should be great! I took a class on Stalinist film and fiction with Professor Larsen during sophomore year, and it was absolutely amazing. I did a couple projects on children’s literature in the USSR, and we also read some fascinating books and watched some incredibly interesting films. Larsen is a fantastic prof, really intelligent and passionate. You can’t go wrong by taking this course.

Piggybacking off of ofcabbagesandkings's earlier blog, Why am I a major in Media Studies?? It’s a kinda weird story actually. I came in to college as a chemistry and marine biology major. What changed that??? I don’t know. Actually, 4 hour chemistry labs probably had a lot to do with it. Some of it was also probably not having an outlet for creativity in the areas I was studying. Studying chemical equations made me miserable and I hated not being able to input my opinion into any of it. Memorizing equations and how to complete formulas was just not what I wanted to do for four years of my life.

The last candidate for the position in Media Studies / Sociology will be speaking tomorrow at 4:15 PM in Hahn 108! Details below...

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DEVORAH HEITNER
(Ph.D. Northwestern University)
Candidate in Sociology & Media Studies

"POSITIVELY BLACK: BLACK POWER TELEVISION, 1969-1980"

Wednesday, November 29
4:15 PM, Hahn 108

Devorah Heitner is a Ph.D. Candidate in Media, Technology, & Society at Northwestern. Her research focuses on how African Americans challenged racist conditions in U.S. media by creating a national movement of black public a

Have you ever just looked around in one of your media studies classes and thought to yourself, "is this actually happening?" Did I seriously get to watch Youtube and talk about video games for 2 and a half hours yesterday and call that class? Wow, did I ever choose the right major.

This is just a small blog to rejoyce in the fact that instead of learning about the constitution, supply and demand, or memorizing the periodic table of elements, I am watching "hologrinding" in a galaxy far, far, away. Man, isn't Media Studies just the shit sometimes?

So for the presentation, if you get a chance, take a look at "What Does a Very Large-Scale Conversation Look Like?" by Warren Sack. It's related to the Vesna article and is kind of weird. One thing that struck me in these two chapters that I think people should think about for the presentation tomorrow is the distance between academia and real people. This is a major problem I have with much of academia that gets too wrapped up in the theoretical and ignores what real people are doing or thinking. Thinking back on our previous readings, I was okay with the Foucault, Barthes articles because they were being academics wrapped up in academic subjects.