Postmodern Architecture and the Return of Style

After reading through pages 337-343 of Practices of Learning, I found the conflict between modernism and post-modernism to actually be surprisingly interesting. The modernist architecture and international style movements were intended to reduce buildings down to their basic forms and take away all excess decorations, while the post-modernist movement was intended to bring interesting form back to design. Boxy designs were rejected and the tops of buildings often have some sort of decorative shapes. Some supporters of the older modernist movement decided that the new style was too gaudy for their tastes, so the neo-modernist movement was created. This whole movement and counter-movement brings to mind a back-and-forth tug of war, with two schools of thought competing for dominance. I personally prefer the look of something like the post-modern Petronas Towers (seen below) over Modernist blocky towers, but that's just me. Regardless, both sides have good points and neither group seems truly right or wrong.

Triptych

The below is a Triptych, basically a collection of three related objects. I made it for my DTC 356 class and buried it at the Kennewick part of Columbia Park in a plastic bag.

(Please note that the GPS coordinates are close yet not exactly perfect, so 46.22798256340070, -119.181282820533237 is likely a bit more accurate. However, the difference is only a few feet either way, so regardless of which you choose, either one should be fine.)

Globaization: Good or Bad?

Globalization is a highly controversial and debated topic that has existed since roughly the mi-20th century. Interestingly enough, our class's book shows just how varied people's opinions on this topic can be. Some countries and organizations have seen American business franchises spreading to other countries as a form of so called "cultural imperialism", which essentially replaces the existing cultures of other nations with that which Is found in America. One recent example of this has been Russia's apparent desire to remove McDonalds from their country. On the other hand, our book gives an example of how in China McDonalds has been met with a generally positive impression. I personally find it fascinating how different cultures and political relations can cause dramatically different opinions.

Google and Piracy

In an interesting turn of events, Google recently announced that they will be partially changing up how their name sake search engine works in relation to illegal websites. While up to recently illegal sites could and would often come up among the top results while searching for media, often above legitimate websites, they are planning to allow legitimate websites to pay money in order to take the top spot. One example of the pirate-friendly nature of the current situation can be found if you were to type anime into Google. The very top result is a pirating site, with the legitimate site Crunchyroll appearing further down the page. This is obviously not in the producers of these shows favor, so they and other media companies will likely welcome these search engine change. If you are interested in learning more about the upcoming changes, you can read more here: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-29689949

Media in Everyday Life

One chapter of our book was dedicated to the topic of media, particularly the use of it in everyday life. It first established that media is any sort of medium that is used to convey information, and then listed a wide variety of media types. More interesting was the second half which focused on the critique of media and how it might or might not effect people's lives in various ways. I found the section about how just a few companies often end up controlling the majority of the media to stand our to me personally due to the fact that I've done some research on this topic previously. Overall, this chapter was rather long, but it managed to keep my interest throughout with it's engaging references to real-world examples.

Categorization

Our teacher had us read an interesting article by an author named George Lakoff on the topic of categorization. I had never previously put much thought into the topic, as categorization is such a simple thing, right? Well, according to this guy, it's more complicated than what most people assume. He is basically saying that categories are abstract concepts, and as he goes along with this line of reasoning, deduces that if we accept this as true, many of the commonly held western views on reality simply aren't true. To be honest, the topic became more and more dense as I was reading, so by the end he was a bit difficult to follow, but I'm fairly sure the gist of what he was saying is that we need to reconsider some of our basic long-held assumptions about the human mind.

Image Reproduction in the Digital Age

One of our class's recent reading was on digital image reproduction, covering aspects such as both copying and manipulation. I for one have first-hand experience with issues relating to the topic. My favorite internet forum had an incident roughly one year ago when one of the members posted a generic image of a Toucan to the forum. Unknown to him, it was copyrighted. The owner(s) of the image somehow found out one way or another and were understandably displeased. They had the forum shut down from public viewing until moderators were able to go in and delete the offending post. This incident helped show me that some companies take their intellectual property very seriously and that stealing from them can have major consequences.