Response to Lecture “Visual Culture” 10/25/2011

This week’s lecture started out like the rest, with a video. Sometimes I get a little confused as to how the video or movie clips we watch relate to the lecture. By the end of the lecture, I understood what the lesson was all about. The first video we watched were clips from the movie The Reader starring Kate Winslet. In the clips that we watched it shows Kate Winslet who is an illiterate woman who has her lover/boyfriend read books to her in flashbacks of the main story.  Mr. Z then showed us that in the future this woman is put on trial for murder, and accused of writing incriminating letters.  The majority of women who took the stand said she wrote the letters, and I have no idea why because we didn’t see that part of the story. Anyways, when the judge asks the woman (Kate Winslet) to write on a paper so that they can compare her handwriting to that of the letter, she is so ashamed of her illiteracy that she confesses to a murder that she did not commit. I found the clips interesting and actually want to watch the whole movie myself once I get a chance.

Afterwards Mr. Z began talking about 21^st literacy vs. text literacy. I agree that today’s culture has become a “visual culture”, and I think it’s crazy that there is actually 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube per minute! I liked that Mr. Z said that “media creates values” and “media defines culture” because these days that is very true, although many people don’t see how much culture has changed with the new waves of technology.  Visual “language” was broken up into five categories: film, television, commercial advertising, and photography, all of which are what dominate what surrounds us today. These five sectors of visual language are more powerful today than they ever were before and influence everyone’s daily life whether we realize it or not.

Lastly, I liked that Mr. Z brought up the topic of the publish button being a political statement. Being able to blog online is a freedom that came with technology and it is one we must enjoy while we still have it. The fact Wiki Leaks shut down on October 24^th, 2011, after offering to work with the government and only leaking what they approve goes to show that the government is becoming a big brother and will soon be monitoring and controlling what every person posts online. I also found Mr. Z’s argument that Thomas Paine was America’s 1^st blogger to be quite fascinating.