I found this video and it basically sums up every element that a film needs to win an Oscar. Given that our class is about studying elements of film, I thought I'd share!

Although movies and cinema are a way to powerfully tell a story based in literature, I was interested in what people thought about a similar medium of shorter duration, mainly television programs.  People obviously intake a lot of information by watching TV. The fact that TV shows are so accessible to understand is interesting to me. Maybe TV shows just play to our short attention span, or are watered down enough so as to make the message of the show almost completely explicit upon viewing.

I do, however, find the medium of TV  a worthy cause for study. The fact that so many people not only enjoy TV, but also learn really well from it speaks to its ability to communicate. It is no surprise to me that a lot of courses, particularly in elementary and middle schools, heavily rely on TV for communicating difficult subjects like Biology and Chemistry.  
 

With the end of the semester, I was just curious what people thought overall about the books we've read. Barthes talks a lot about the ability of a literary text to include and entice the reader into creating the overall meaning associated with the work, calling classical texts "writerly" (in that they're been written in stone, avoiding the input of the reader) and ideal texts "readerly" (readers create the text). It's kind of cool to think about what makes up a book-is it just the pages bound in paper, or is there something more; a metaphysical quality that is indefinable in its potential "to-be"

I am interested about the consequences of the blogging revolution. A lot of journalists say that blogging and the movement of news and information to the internet (away from established peer-reviewed journals) attributes to the mass amounts of misinformation that seems to be spreading through the US. Especially with some of the more recent huge campaigns (i.e. "health care death-panels"), it does seem like the wave of blogging is not neccessarily completely positive.  The fact that some bloggers with no credentials are trusted more than the experts or officials (the people that the bloggers report on!) is kind of scary!