Workshop: Cultural Influences
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Workshop: Cultural Influences

Week
Dates
September 12, 2024
Type
LectureLab
Section
Rationality Technology & Power
Reading

Herbert Marcuse

Location
In Class
Related to Due Dates (Class)

Lecture

TBD

Field Work Session: Cultural Timeline

Today, we’re going to take a historical view of the community you’ve chosen to study (ethnographic study) so that you can put into it’s appropriate context. Using any medium you’d like (digital or analog, whiteboard, or sketch pad), create a timeline of your object. The timeline should document the social and cultural trends that needed to be developed for your object to come into the world.

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For example, if your object is the community surrounding a true crime podcast, you might go back to the late 1800s when “trials of the century” were widely followed in local newspapers. We can trace the interest in crime and reportage from journalism into reality television (Cops int he 1980s) into YouTube videos (early 2000s) and into true crime podcasts (2010s, and the popularity of NPR’s Serial). Likewise, you can trace podcast fandom back to NPR’s Serial and begin to sketch how communities emerged.

Steps:

  1. Make a very rough timeline of the cultural influences and history of your community. Take around 15 minutes.
  2. Get into a group of about four students, and compare the timelines.
  3. Combine your timelines and highlight the major themes. Note the similarities, and differences.
  4. Then start to work on a formal timeline that incoporates all of your projects. Be creative in how you choose to present it. Sketch by hand, in Figma, in PowerPoint, use the whiteboard or an actual notepad. But, it should be clear to others. Make it as detailed as possible. You’re working to show a complex idea with an image.
  5. Post the combined timeline on Teams so that we can all see them.
  6. Turn in your timeline into eLearning for Journal 2.

Turn in to eLearning

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I’ll happily take either written paragraphs or an audio file for your weekly journals.

  1. A short paragraph explaining your timeline.
  2. A copy of the timeline you produced in class (an image is fine)
  3. A short paragraph that covers the following from the reading this week:
    1. How this week’s reading related to the previous week’s reading
    2. Something you found insightful, interesting, or confusion from the weeks reading