COME 329: Application Paper
- In my Political Communication class my senior year, I wrote a paper about another topic not taken seriously in an academic context: memes. Memes are spread online, and while at times they have no meaning, other times they have influence over political elections, or make people think of candidates a certain way. According to Hall and Sinclair, memes examine “humor, intertextual reference, and anomalous juxtaposition”, and have a role in the marketplace of ideas for the reason that they make a difference in the voters’ minds. I believe it critically analyzes the message of memes because at face value, they might not mean much, but by looking further, there can be political insight.
COME 384: Technological Psychosis
- Technological Psychosis is the idea that technology is taking over, and relates to the ever-growing presence of technology in our daily lives. In this paper, I use the idea of miscommunication and relate it to a movie without present-day technology: 1994’s “Pulp Fiction”. I included it here because in studying a single scene for the movie and speculating on the contents of the briefcase, it is analyzing the movie much more critically than the average viewer.
COME 384: Black Mirror Essay
- I wrote this Black Mirror essay during my junior year for Communication Technology Social Change, and I thought it belonged here because forms of media (like episodes of television shows or movies) deserve academic merit, and even though one can watch media without critical analysis doesn’t mean they should. Any form of media can be studied and looked at further than surface-level, and it’s papers like these that explain exactly why I studied Communication and Media Studies in college. I love being able to read further into certain areas of study, and using media academically.
COME 467: Image and Sound Essay
- This paper is another example of me reading into something that maybe most viewers would not normally: the scene before Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi’s final fight scene at the end of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. I look at the different camera angles used, the music present, how George Lucas decided to position each actor, and their word usage. I wrote this in my senior thesis class for second semester: Television Criticism. This paper is part of my culmination as a communication scholar, and I chose to write about Star Wars to further prove the point that all media has academic merit. There are ways to critically analyze gaming journalism, episodes of Black Mirror, popular movies, and Star Wars, just as seriously as one can analyze works of Hall and Sinclair, Marshall McLuhan, or major media conglomerates.
