Hi everyone,
For our closing discussions this coming week, we turn to the aesthetic and social possibilities of digital culture in the form of the animated gif. For Tuesday, we’ll be reading Kate M. Miltner and Tim Highfield’s article “Never Gonna GIF You Up: Analyzing the Cultural Significance of the Animated GIF,” and Amanda Hess’ “The Silent Film Returns — On Social Media” (in the packet as well as complete with gifs online) This blog post asks you to do some producing as well as some analyzing as a way of engaging with the meaning of the gif.
Once you’ve read these two pieces, you should create a gif that illustrates some of the characteristics they discuss as central to the meaning of the gif as a genre. To do this, I recommend using the gif-making tool on Giphy or on Imgflip. Both of these sites will ask you to register — I know, I know — but you’re also welcome to use whatever other tools or sites you like to make and post your gif. You can browse around on these sites or on Youtube to find some video material that you think would be good source material, and then enter the URL for that material on the tool page, which will then take you to a page where you can add a caption, filters, etc. — be creative with these possibilities, but you should at least add a caption that helps you to focus and convey the effect and meaning you want your gif to have.
In addition to being funny, your gif should say something — try to use this format and genre to make a larger cultural point of some sort, whether that be about media, culture, social issues, the current global moment, or something else (if you like, think of this as a warmup to one approach to this week’s thread on Discord). In your post, you should include a link to your gif, and analyze it through the framework of a specific piece or pieces of writing from Miltner and Highfield and/or Hess — show how your gif illustrates the ideas and issues they’re discussing.
Reminder: your response should go in the comments section for this post — click the “Leave a Comment” link at the top of the post. It should be at least 250 words, and is due by 9:00am on Tuesday, April 21st. If you have any questions, let me know via email.
So let’s use this week’s blog to start doing that kind of work: you should first read the two articles by Poniewozik for Tuesday, and then use your post to think about what seems most significant to you about streaming TV based on your reading. How does streaming as Poniewozik theorizes it alter concepts we’ve been talking about such as flow, complexity, or culture itself? What does streaming do to time, to how we engage with TV, or to the role it plays in our social and political lives? You’re welcome to reflect on the significance of these readings and the issues they raise in any way that seems important to you, as long as you do so through some close examination of text from both articles — make sure to integrate these pieces into your writing, and try to think about how the two pieces you choose relate to one another.
We’ll consider Breaking Bad and The Handmaid’s Tale as examples of this kind of work together in our Monday screening, but for Tuesday’s class our goal is to start considering how the overall vocabulary of complexity helps us to think about television more critically and analytically, and how we might apply that vocabulary. So your post for this week should have two elements. First, you should work to explicate and engage a key passage from Mittell’s chapter: what are some of his key claims in the place you choose, what do they mean, and how do you respond — what seems important there and why? As in past weeks, you should focus on a meaty quotation of a few sentences here. Then apply that thinking to a show or series that strikes you as relevant to the issues you’re raising — obviously you can’t discuss the entirety of the series, so think of our discussions of film narrative and the short encapsulations Mittell gives as models for how to connect these materials. Try to think of examples that Mittell doesn’t mention, so that we can work on applying this framework in new ways and new directions.
Once you’ve read the material by Williams, you should spend at least 1-2 hours watching primetime TV and reflecting on how it illustrates the concepts and issues he discusses. Then for this week’s blog you should post some thoughts connecting the two: what seem to be the most significant arguments about television in Williams’ argument — where do they appear in his writing, and what’s significant about them? And how do you see those ideas playing out in the television you watch — what workings of TV do you see that illustrate, complicate, contradict, or otherwise relate to what strikes you as important in Williams’ thinking? You’re free to pursue these connections in whatever way seems significant and interesting to you, as long as you ground your thinking in some quotation and close analysis of Williams’ writing to set up your analysis of television content.
