The Globe Theatre brings new life to the classic comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” with a diverse cast.
The Globe Theatre’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Summer 2019
Category: Media and Cultural Studies
American Politics as Neo-Romanticism: Is Trump a Byronic Hero?
#Fitspo: Health, Privacy, and Instagram
Fitness as a publicly discussed facet of identity is a relatively new phenomenon in pop culture. I attempt to explore the disruption of health and fitness privacy norms by the social media technology Instagram and its role in promoting negative social comparison. I will explain why we should be mindful of the impact of this technology on social comparison, define what social comparison is and the context-relative information norms for this practice, and then show how those norms are affected by Instagram use. I will conclude by exploring the normative value of those effects, and how the technology could be used to motivate better health outcomes for users. Continue reading “#Fitspo: Health, Privacy, and Instagram”
Internet Killed The TV Star: The Mutual Shaping of Tech & Culture
A cursory reading of the history of streaming television will paint its inception and effect as techno-deterministic. However, this is not the whole picture. I will argue that not only technological but also cultural conditions of the post-network era (2004 – present) gave rise to streaming technology, empowering some previously underserved television viewers by making their interests more difficult to ignore. This complicates an understanding of social change through a purely techno-deterministic framework by presenting industry and market (expressions of culture) as equally powerful as technology (Lessig, 2006) in determining the state of society. I will begin by briefly tracing how the technological evolution of TV affects content. I Continue reading “Internet Killed The TV Star: The Mutual Shaping of Tech & Culture”
The Dark Dandy: Aesthetic Subversion in Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal
There is a certain satisfaction from seeing the good guy catch the bad guy. The tropes of genre allow one to anticipate a certain pattern and find joy when those anticipated elements come to pass (Smith, 2010). But what happens when this logic is subverted? In the current programming-dense “peak” of television, the avid postmodern viewer exhausts genre power, asking TV to be more, do more. In this way, not satisfying audience expectations actually produces more satisfaction. In Hannibal (2013-2015), a genre-defying television show developed and produced by Bryan Fuller, this is accomplished by complicating what is good and evil through careful aesthetic subversion that supports, in formal elements, a plot that with a consumerist morality deifies the bad guy, Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). In doing so, such a show
Continue reading “The Dark Dandy: Aesthetic Subversion in Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal”
Cristina Forever 