Art and Copy review

In the documentary Art & Copy that we watched in class, the things that stood out the most to me are the following:

• Good advertising is marketing joined with entertainment. What made this stand out to me was that ad firms used to keep their art directors away from their writers and out of the conference rooms. But once a firm put the two together, the ads that they made became very successful.
• Theatrics play a part. One of the women who worked for a very large firm was commenting in the documentary about how her background in theatrics helped immensely when working on ads.

Ideology and Consciousness Notes

In our in-class study of semiotics, my group was looking at Ideology and Consciousness. These are my notes.

Ideology is the values and morals we were raised around. They were other peoples' values that became our own because we grew up with them.

The main examples that my group found on ideology are Russel's Teapot and Plato's cave.

False Consciousness (I looked at this more than plain consciousness) is when the ideology that you grew up around shapes the ways you think (consciousness) to the point that you act without thinking why- you don't think through what you're doing because that's just the way it's done according to your ideology.

Game Abuse

This week, I read the article "Game Changer: Why gaming culture allows abuse... and how we can stop it" written by Katherine Cross. This article talked about a few instances around 2006 where women who stood out in the gaming community by playing, commentating on, or even designing games were verbally abused and sexually harassed by a (substantial) portion of male gamers (as in, they made national news). Cross explains one of the reasons that this harassment took place, then goes on to tell how the tides changed and a greater portion of the gaming community stood up for the women who were under attack.

The main problem that caused this harassment, Cross says, is that the players doing the harassing felt threatened. She says that previously, games and video game playing was mostly done by men. Cross says that the world of games was kind of like a mens locker room where they can go and be themselves and no one would care. They could go to games and be the most important person in the world. (I'm completely summarizing the article, by the way, sorry.) So when a woman was entering that world of games, a portion of male gamers felt like their dominance was being threatened. Thus, verbal abuse and sexual harassment was used to "put the women in their place" so to speak in this "mans world of games."

Cross goes on to say that because of the sheer amount of abuse and harassment from the few instances that she spoke of, these issues were brought to a national level and gamers from every walk of life stood up for the women who had been harassed. One of the organizations who's employee had been attacked with harassment donated to an anti-bullying charity, and the subject was talked about in news sources a lot. Some of the more public figures who did the harassing apologized as well.

So, how does this article relate to my research topic of community in online gaming? Well, behind every player in-game is a human being in the real world. Something like verbal abuse or sexual harassment towards any player, regardless of gender, is that action to those people in real life. Sometimes, people think a game is just a game, but it is not. A game brings people together from all over the world, and bullying or hurting those people builds up walls between people as well as hurts the person on the receiving end; and that is simply not acceptable.

Looking at Ways of Seeing

After watching the first episode of the Ways of Seeing series by John Berger, these are my thoughts.

The most important topic in the video to me was the idea of the camera diminishing the worth of original paintings. Berger spoke of this frequently through the program. He spoke about how the invention of the camera re-invented the paintings in a way because they could be reproduced and viewed all over the world. Later on in the program, Berger said that these reproductions distorted the meanings of the paintings, and even destroyed those meanings.

"The camera, by making the work of art transmittable, has multiplied its possible meanings and destroyed its unique original meaning." -John Berger, Ways of Seeing

This in a way shows how peoples ideology shapes how they view things like images. As another example of this, Berger showed a picture of a painting to some young children and each of them came to a different understanding of what the image meant. Their own experiences shaped how they saw the painting.

As for what I find the most interesting from the video as well as the Media Studies course so far, it would be the idea that each person can view and interpret the same thing differently. It's a concept that I am still wrapping my mind around and I think it's very interesting.