Intertextuality, according to Dr. Strangelove, is when “the meaning of any one text is deeply dependent on all the texts surrounding it.”

For example, Jon Lajoie’s Everyday Normal Guy is only funny when it is compared to modern rap videos.

Rap stars usually brag about being extraordinary; having a lot of money, having a lot of women, living a large house, having a lot of material goods, and everyone wanting be them. Jon Lajoie creates a rap video where he raps about the complete opposite; how he is just a normal guy, “nothing special ‘bout me.” He goes on to say how he only has $600 dollars in the bank, he needs to take the bus to go to his call center job, he is not very good with women, and so on.

Jon’s video would not be understood in the same way if the viewer was not aware of current rap music.

In class we watched Bell Hooks speak about her observations of her teaching experiences. She is a distinguished English professor at City College of New York.

Bell Hooks went from teaching at mostly white post secondary schools like Yale to teaching at a mostly black community college in Harlum New York. By being able to compare these different students, Hooks was able to make her observation that “thinking critically is at the heart of anybody transforming their life.”

Hooks argues that someone who is disadvantaged materially has the ability to transform their life in a deep and profound way if they can think critically. And that someone who may be very privileged materially would not be able to transform their life in a meaningful way if they needed to if they don’t think critically.

Hooks found that her students in Harlum were equally as bright as her students from Yale but she found that “their senses of what the meaning of what that brilliance was and what they could do with it, their sense of agency, was profoundly different.” She found that her students at Yale were open to embracing their future where as her students in Harlum didn’t have that sense of entitlement and many teachers at the college in Harlum would not give their students the gift of critical thinking that they need in order to really make a difference in their lives.

There is a lot of talk in our pop culture about authenticity in media, but what exactly is authenticity? Theo van Leeuwen from Cardiff University answers this very question in his article entitled, What is Authenticity?

In his article van Leeuwen gives several definitions of authenticity. One definition being when “its origin or authorship are not in question, and it is not an imitation or copy.” That definition is pretty self explanatory; when some one credible created something brand new.

Another interpretation of authenticity van Leeuwen gives is a “faithful reconstruction or representation.” The example he gives of this is when baroque music is played on authentic instruments in historically accurate ways.

Last, he states that something can be authentic when it is “thought to be true to the essence of something, to reveal a truth, a deeply felt sentiment, or the way these are worded or otherwise expressed.” An example of this could be the style of an artist or the voice of a singer. van Leeuwen elaborates to say that singers can perform in many different styles, but in order to be distinct and viewed as having an authentic style or voice, they must adopt just one style

and abandon the others. 

Fair use is, according to Dr. Strangelove, the “creative reworking of someone else’s material.” He states that a good way to judge if something is fair use or not is to check if it changes the audience or if significant value is being added. Fair use allows individuals to use corporate images, audio, etc, in their own creative ways and upload them to sites like You Tube without getting in trouble.

However, there are not actual people sorting through the You Tube videos deciding what is fair use and what is not. You Tube has computer algorisms which look through the site’s content and remove ‘corporate’ content, mostly according to audio. These algorisms remove many videos that are fair use of corporate material. You can file a counter claim to have your video put back up but most people don’t know that fair use exists and if they do, they don’t know how to use it.

Dr. Strangelove said, “advertisement supported media is legitimate, whereas amateur appropriated media is illegitimate.” ‘They’ want to remove as much amateur media as they can because the more time we spend watching sites like You Tube, the less time we are spending watching corporate material such as television and movies, therefore, we are seeing less advertisements.

fair use of Barbie logo

In Dancing in the Distraction Factory by Andrew Goodwin, he states that, “star imagery builds on vulnerability and ordinariness to establish points of identification for the audience.” Stars need to be viewed as vulnerable and ordinary for the audience to be able to relate to them and for the viewers to find the stars authentic.

However, the star persona is extremely complex and paradoxical. Goodwin quotes John Ellis who states that star images “are composed, like narrative images, of elements which do not cohere, of contradictory tendencies.” Ellis elaborates that the star image is incoherent because it shows the celebrity as both an ordinary person and as an extraordinary person. The star needs to have both qualities in order to achieve the greatest fame. We need to find the star authentic and believable but at the same time they need to have something special and extraordinary about them for us to be interested in them.

Andrew Tolson’s article, ‘Being yourself’: the pursuit of authentic celebrity, says that celebrities ‘being themselves’ should be understood as a type of public performance, however, it is crucial that they are not perceived as acting. Tolson argues that part of the public’s fascination with stars is the attempt to discover their true identities and private lives. Personal disclosure is key in talk show interviews; guests appear to be showing us their ‘true’ selves, and discussing their ‘feelings’ and reflect on their private lives with impunity. Tolson quotes Bell and Van Leeuwen (1994):

“What is revealed is not so much the ‘real’ or ‘deep’ personality behind the mask of celebrity. It is, rather, the fascination of the role of celebrity, both for the person who speaks about his/her own celebrity-induced experiences and for the slightly wide-eyed interviewer and audience”.

Celebrities present to their audience what is meant to be interpreted as their real and true selves; however, what they are really presenting is the version of their true selves and personal lives constructed in order to please their audience. 

L.S. Kim’s article Sex and the Single Girl in Post Feminism defines post feminism as the era after second wave feminism and the backlash against feminism. It is a time where women begin to feel that there is no more need for feminism because equality has been achieved. Kim gauges the status of women by examining the ways in which female desire and female pleasure are regulated and controlled.

One way in which female desire and pleasure are regulated and controlled is through post feminist discourse. Kim observes that “the representation of the independent women in the U.S. network television at the turn of the millennium is problematically post feminist/antifeminist as seen in such programs as Ally McBeal.” Rendering feminism acceptable in a new post feminist era has required a transformation of feminism into post feminism, the switch from Murphy Brown to Ally McBeal.

Murphy Brown, for example, shows independent women challenged by their independence while Ally McBeal shows independent women who are unhappy because of their independence. The public interprets that the unhappy independent women in Ally McBeal are miserable because they are too liberated. According to Kim’s article, these discourses are “used to condemn feminism’s achievements and to suggest a halt to continuing feminist struggle.”

The 1990’s began a shift toward a “pro-girl” rhetoric and the beginning of third wave feminism. According to Ellen Riodan it was women’s success in “masculine” sports such as soccer, baseball, and hockey in the 1996 Olympic Games that led up to the infusion of “girl-power” rhetoric. Part of this shift into third wave feminism is the Riot Grrrl; the Riot Grrrl, according to Ellen Riordan’s article Commodified Agents and Empowered Girls: Consuming and Producing Feminism, refers to a grassroots movement that started in the punk rock community.

Women began forming their own bands and consciouness-raising groups. Riot Grrrl inspired many young women to produce subversive culture in the form of rock music, zines, and poetry and art on internet sites. The messages put out by these Riot Grrrls, according to Riordan, are “overtly political, and many young feminists with a Riot Grrrl sensibility engage in grassroots activism via their cultural production.” In the early stages of the Riot Grrrl movement, many of the women involved were college educated in feminist theory. They use powerful lyrics to encourage cultural consumption and production.

Bibliography

Andrews, Dale. (2008). Digital Overdrive: Communications & Multimedia Technology. Retrieved February 9, 2009, from http://books.google.com/books?id=AlRfsJBEfYAC&dq=dale+andrews+digital+overdrive&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=4PaY9ImMGi&sig=0qJahSskYyVuLz8JSXDu4Ug6Jj8&hl=en&ei=0xeiSfmGKYS4MfyI4dwL&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result#PPP2,M1

Cook, Willam A. (1997). World wide wake-up call. Journal of Advertising Research, 37(2), 5. Retrieved from Communication and Mass Media Complete Database.

Jenkins, Henry, Deuze, Mark. (2008). Convergence Culture. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 14(1), 5-12. Retrieved from Communication Studies: A SAGE Full-Text Collection.

Lüders, Marika. (2008). Conceptualizing Personal Media. New Media and Society, 10(5), 683-702. Retrieved from Communication Studies: A SAGE Full-Text Collection.

Rennie, Ellie. (2007). Community Media in the Prosumer Era. 3CMedia: Journal of Community, Citizen’s & Third Sector Media & Communication, 3, 25-32. Retrieved from Communication and Mass Media Complete Database.

Van Dijck, José. (2009). Television 2.0: Youtube and the Emergence of Homecasting. Media, Culture and Society, 31(1), 41-58. Retrieved from http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:35-I6o5e6l0J:web.mit.edu/ comm-forum/mit5/papers/vanDijck_Television2.0.article.MiT5.pdf+dijck+youtube+and+the+emergence +of+homecasting&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2