ATC Topic Class

Tonight's topic there will probably be reading, but we will discuss survival situations and maybe just do some free talking as is scheduled.

Think about these questions:

Where is the hardest place to survive in your opinion?
What kind of natural disaster do you worry about?
If you were in a plane crash what would you do?
What things would you need to survive a natural disaster/economy collapse etc.?
Are you the kind of person that will do anything to survive in a dangerous situation? Why or why not?
Would you eat another human if it was the only way to survive? Why or why not?

ITC Class: Gender Issues

The ITC class schedule says free talking, so we could just talk about anything, but if you want you could think about some of these questions and related things for class:

- Do you know of any countries where women are treated unfairly? What is their life like there?
- Do men and women have the same rights in your country? How do you like that?
- What qualities do you admire most in people?
- Which is most important for you, good looks or a pleasant personality? Why?
- Who gets the highest marks in your class, boys or girls? How do you explain that?
- Is it right for women to find a job or should they stay at home?
- Do you think housewives live an easy and happy life?
- Are men capable of doing the housework?
- How do you share the household chores at home?
- Should women do the military service?
- Some men beat their girlfriends/wives. Do you think that is tolerable or should the men be punished?

ATC Topic: Toys are culture too at Son Won-kyung’s museum April 24, 2010

An excerpt from a Joongang Daily article. You can find the whole article here

Son Won-kyung stands with some of his action figures at his museum in Samcheong-dong, southern Seoul. By Choi Jeong-dong
“When I became a man, I put away childish things.” So wrote the Biblical apostle Paul.

But in Korea, there’s one man who’s grew up, and for 25 years kept collecting childish things, eventually putting 400,000 of them away in a museum.

Son Won-kyung, who founded the ToyKino Museum in Samcheong-dong, central Seoul, said, “Even though it’s been five years since I opened the museum, some people still treat it as a joke.”

Strictly speaking, the museum isn’t limited to toys. As its name implies, it’s also full of movie memorabilia. Son was born in 1974, and most of his collection centers around movies from that decade, like “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones.”

...

Son has accumulated action figures from the new entries in the Star Wars, Indiana Jones and “Superman” franchises, but nothing from “Terminator Salvation,” because he said he has too many from the previous films.

He’s also currently writing nine books about movies. Last year, he held a private exhibition of pictures based on his toys that was well received.

But costs are starting to catch up with him. Son recently had to close both his museum at the Heyri Artist Valley in Paju, Gyeonggi, and one of the museums in Samcheong-dong.

Describing his philosophy, Son said everyone should respect each other’s diverse cultural tastes.

ITC Notice

This week I'll be providing some materials which I'm not quite sure how to post to the web yet so you'll have to wait till class to see what's up.

ITC Topic Class (possible topic): Library of Congress in The U.S. to Archive Tweets

Here's an edited down version of the full transcript of a radio broadcast which you can find here:  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126086325

HOST: Andy Carvin, senior strategist for NPR's social media desk is here in the studio.



CARVIN: Twitter in many ways has become the pulse of what's going on online right now. Because it's a real-time conversation that anyone can chime into at any given point, it's 24-7. And so when something happens somewhere in the world you're almost guaranteed that people will be talking about it or even witnessing it as it happens, whether it's protests and revolution in Kyrgyzstan to people talking about the ham sandwich they just ate and everything in between. 

And so there are already ways that any of us on any given day can go and find information we're looking for. 




HOST: A Librarian of Congress, James Billington, said the Twitter digital archive has extraordinary potential for research into our contemporary way of life. What do you think tweets are going to tell us about ourselves in 100 years? 




CARVIN: Twitter captures everything and you're going to get a sampling of what life was like at its most mundane and banal and at its most tense and exciting and disturbing because it really is just a reflection of what's going on at any given moment.
And so it makes research rather onerous in some ways but at the same time, historians and archaeologists are always often looking for the mundane because you can't always tell what everyday people were doing.

ATC Topic Class: "Movie critics: Shut up already!"

If you want to see the full article, it's here 

Is criticism dying? Maybe, sort of. OK, yes. Nobody cares! Write about movies, instead of your wounded pride

... If film criticism really is dying, it's doing so with all the dignity of a bunch of clucking old hens, squawking in despair while the fox gnaws his way through the wire. I myself have participated in three panel discussions in the last three years about the dire plight of people who get paid to write about movies other people make -- attended primarily if not exclusively by other critics or aspiring critics -- and there must have been dozens more. No self-respecting film festival, it seems, is complete without one.

This meme has been growing in intensity (and tiresomeness) for four or five years, ever since it became clear that new forms of media were eating away the business model of print journalism and that the elite cadre of professional cultural critics was being swamped by the blogulous hordes of InterTwitterMcGoogleyness. Do I really have to keep writing this paragraph of background explanation? I didn't think so. Thanks! (Salt Lake Tribune blogger Sean P. Means maintains an online list of downsized film critics that now includes 65 names.)...

At the very beginning of my writing career, I learned one thing: Film criticism is a kind of performance, an adjunct form of entertainment. If it isn't funny and lively and engaging, it isn't anything at all. My first gig was writing brief reviews for a community newspaper in San Francisco, spending my own money to attend matinees and then writing them up. The rules were simple: If the publisher of the paper -- a gay businessman in his 50s whom I never met in person -- thought my reviews were funny, they'd get published. (And I'd get paid: $25 per movie.)

Let me make clear that I would agree with virtually any theoretical argument that a defender of old-school film criticism could make. Critics should be educated about the wider world, should know a lot of film history and a little film theory, should be more concerned with the "whys" and "hows" of a movie than with the "whats," should seek to spark debates and disputes and challenge the audience's preconceptions. Check, check and check. Sign me up. But reviewing movies is a lot more like performing stand-up comedy than like delivering a philosophy lecture. None of those grand ideas even begin to matter if you're boring and you can't write.

ITC Topic Class: Rumors

Here is an excerpt from a Joongang Daily Article  about rurmors.

"Why do we accept rumors? In his book “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done,” Harvard Professor Cass Sunstein described one of the reasons as the “social waterfall effect.” When we make a judgment, we have a tendency to depend on the thoughts and actions of others. That’s why when the majority of the people you know believe in a rumor, you also start to believe it.

The second reason is “group polarization.” When people with the same thought get together to talk, they end up with a far more extreme version of that thought than before. And yet, they still believe themselves to be reasonable.

Consider the propagation of rumors that grow bigger as they are reproduced through blogs and message-board comments.

For example, former Prime Minister Han Myeong-sook was recently acquitted of bribery in a trial. However, there is no way to undo the “unverified information” that was already leaked during the investigation.

There has been all sorts of speculation surrounding the sinking of the Korean naval corvette Cheonan. The most radical of these rumors started from the opposition floor leader commenting that the media conference of the survivors sounded “somewhat contrived"."

ATC Topic Class

Hey ATCers,

This Wednesday's class we'll be discussing obeying authority, and violence on television. A recent news story about a fake death game in France. Have a look here


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124838091

ITC Class Monday April 19th

ITC-ers here is the link to the article for Monday's class. All future Links will be posted here, so check here to see when it's posted for each class. I might also post some extra class materials here, when I figure out how.

Goth Kittens

ATC Class

Hey ATC students, thanks for visiting my DE blog. Here you can find the article for discussion next Monday. Feel free to comment on what you think of this topic, suggest other topics etc. See you Monday. 

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