Filed under: anne, media everyday media, theory | Tags: body, discourse, foucault, health
This question seems to become increasingly important within everyday life, not only as a polite way of starting a conversation, but even more so for media and public bodies to check on the nation’s health. TV shows on public and private broadcasting showing the daily diet of a 150 kg man chewed up in a see-through tube or the likely development of an overweight child in a more than disturbing computer simulation have become daily family programme.
Discourses surrounding a person’s body and how to stay fit and healthy have not only swamped tv, but also pretty much any other medium I can think of. One recent, rather funny element of the whole health frenzy, I think, is Nintendo’s wii console where people can exercise playing virtual golf or doing a boxing exercise. The pinnacle, however, is the new wii balance board, enabling people to do pushups in their living room on this board while keeping the balance and, at the end of the exercise, measure their weight “more accurately than with a typical bathroom scale.” You can ski on the board, too. What once was a game console for people / teenies and 20/30 somethings has evolved into a DIY fitness studio.
Filed under: aristea, culture, space and everyday life, theory | Tags: anarcho-punk, crass, cultural history, experience, may 68, situationist, squatting
Apropos Sam’s notion, here is my culture, experience and history paper
‘Squatting is more than just living’: Squatted Spaces of the UK Movement and, hopefully, others will follow. This paper is an approach to cultural history methods which, at least as far as I understood it in the short period I had the course, uses diverse sources of evidence, sources that may seem un-scientific since it formulates obscure research questions and is clearly interdisciplinary.
Filed under: commodities, culture, media everyday media, sam, space and everyday life, theory
model living: experiencing the ideal home from the great exhibition to ikea (culture, experience and history)
- this one traces a cultural history of exhibited model interiors, finding that the home exhibition has, in the late C20th, moved beyond the exhibition hall, informing a specific type of commerce and providing images that have become ingrained in the consumer’s imagination.
limitless postponements: the changing presence of control (media theory and research II)
- this one offers an addendum to the foucault-deleuze discourse on control and discipline, arguing that the contemporary regime of control is pre-emptive and encourages living for tomorrow over living for today.
anyone else want to offer up their term papers?
Filed under: media everyday media, sam, theory | Tags: geertz culture definitions
So, we (those of us on the media and cultural studies MA) are about five months in now, and I have a question: what is culture, anyway?
I appreciate that this question is probably unanswerable – probably best unanswered, even – but I was wondering if anyone else could find a succinct definition for what they take ‘culture’ to mean?
My current favourite comes from Clifford Geertz (1973):
“The concept of culture I espouse… is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of a law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.”
