Week 2 - Reflecting on Resources Pack A

Reading Material

 Johnson (2005) in his article Everything bad is good for you, floats the idea that being involved with popular culture can be good for us and won't, as our parents put it, give us square eyes or make us misfits within society. In some ways I can agree with this - if you spend long enough playing Angry Birds, you will actually use the long lost components of your brain to apply maths and physics in a sort of real world application (otherwise known as making killing the green pigs to get to the next level). With that being said, this is shouldn't be used as an excuse to spend hours watching TV and claiming it to educational.

I found the video lecture by Jenkins fascinating (I was googling to find more videos of him after the clip ended - I could have listened to him all day). Participatory culture has been around for generations, but the internet age is really the first time that adults and adolescents can come together and share ideas as equals. I think it's a mixture of changing social norms and technological advances which means that every voice has equal weight. There are few barriers which stop people from engaging and everybody believes that their opinion matters. He also goes onto say that participatory culture ignites an informal learning. This links in with the Johnson article by saying that this engagement can develop important leadership and communication skills along with equipping them with various norms, mores and ideas that can help serve their broader offline communities; there is the fact that while these "skills" are being developed online - they are probably not being put into practice in real world settings and that the most important thing about these technologies is balance.  (I love the story of the Chilean senator and his theory that World of Warcraft holds the key for Latin America becoming more involved in global conversations).

Now for the not so good stuff. I found the Fiske article dry and dated, it lost me when it said that popular culture has come out of people oppressing women and children and "a housewife regularly buying romance novels and finds some pleasure in her husbands disapproval..." (Fiske, 2010, pgs 44-45) What? How the hell is that relevant to the modern day? Who care's if she reads romance novels (not that this isn't at all stereotypical) As for the example of the Newlywed Game... I could see the different reactions and how the "text" impacted them but the fact he was arguing that it was used to deal with patriarchy? When the women on the show answered "Yes Master" about their sex lives - yeah, I'm not buying it.