Reflection Essay

Reflection Essay on a course I had found mostly dry and redundant. It is evidently difficult for me to put forth a meaningful reflection that forced me to fill a minimum of 2000 words.

Grant Tabler

Stacey Johnson

MDST 1030

23 March 2010

A Reappraisal of My Way of Seeing

            Images are a way in which we define ourselves culturally. Our society is one that constantly endeavours to classify and catalogue the world around us through various media. With this in mind, a project to group together a series of images for scholarly commentary seemed appropriate for a journal in a Visual Culture class. An essay which reflects on the process of commenting on the images, a meta-reflection even, seemed somewhat less appropriate to myself and I’m sure others in this class, whether concerns of this type are raised or not. For, writing about writing always seems like a superficial endeavour. Despite any scepticism I may have towards this way of writing I shall, none the less, attempt to reflect on my visual journal with all the objectivity I can.

Regarding Term Paper

This is a superbowl commercial I found while doing another project recently, in another class for Ian, the same teacher who started us on these blogs actually. Anyway, although I'm sure there are thousands of examples of my term paper's point I particularly like this one as it seems to be my term paper "remediated" into video form. Funny that I found it while doing a project on remediation.



I found this video spoke to my term paper because it has all the same aspects. Everyone on the street is separated from each other, despite their proximity they're all in their own worlds. I found it particularly ironic in the scene where a woman is having trouble getting a stroller up a flight of stairs, a man sitting on the stairs on his laptop changes into his avatar which happens to be a superhero. Yet despite his media imagining of superhero status he still ignores, or cannot see the woman in need of help in the real world.

The following scene shows an interesting event as well. There is a kid sitting with his dog. The kid is in his own world using his PSP for some type of racing game, and the dog is just sitting and watching him with his ball. The dog rolls the ball to his would-be walker though to no avail, the owner is trapped in their media cocoon.

Coca-cola is quite clever with their final scene though. They not only show an almost Mcluhanist warning of media immersion, they also made a solicitation of their product by showing coca-cola as the only thing truly powerful enough to free people from their media-trance.

Though I suppose I can understand how the two characters both somehow ordered the same drink at that internet cafe esque location. The final exterior shots shows us that for some reason the internet cafe has a giant coca-cola logo on the roof rather than a name for the cafe. I guess the drink choices could be a bit limiting in that case.