juliarusblog

 

1. Nike – Forrest Gump (1994)

 

2. Dr. Pepper – 90210 (2008)

 

3. Pepsi – The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)

4. Pizza Hat – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

5. Beats – Transformers 4 (2014)

6. Bud light – Transformers 4 (2014)

7. Google – The Internship (2013)

8. CocaCola – Breaking Bad (2008-2013) 

9. CocaCola – American Idol (2002-present time)

10. Heineken – Skyfall (2012)

 

 

1.  As television and cable change their shape and size, do they remain the dominant way our culture tells stories?

The boom of TV happened in 1950. That’s when it became “electronic heart” where everyone gathered together to watch favorite TV shows and important moments in the history of the country, such as inauguration, moonwalks, space disasters, sport events and etc. (Campbell, 228) Sixty years ago television was embraced as common grounds or as a “touchstone in our lives” that brought the whole population together (Campbell, 189) However, if earlier a family had one TV where they all gathered every evening to watch news, now TV can be found everywhere – on tablets, phones or laptops. Television is adapting to modern demands of the people and now it became both “electronic heart and digital encounter” (Campbell, 228) However, in all it forms –whether big TV screens or little smartphones- television was and still is the major way our culture tells stories.

2. Today, television remains the main place, whether it’s the big LED screen or the handheld smartphone, where we go for stories. In what ways do you think this will change or remain the case in the future?

I believe that it will still remain the case in future, but with changing in format. Like now, “third screens” and “fourth screens” are very popular, this will develop even more in future. Third screens are internet streaming of popular TV shows (Campbell, 221) However, the major disadvantage of third screen TV is that people can only watch “catch-up services”. Fourth-screens as used by many as an additional screen while watching TV. Its portability means that consumers may no longer need TV sets. However, it’s hard to call laptops and smartphones a replacement for a traditional TV set, but rather an addition.

3. Where do you prefer to get your stories?

Most of my stories I get on YouTube, just because it’s quick and gives you brief information about movies or current events. I also get information on my laptop using online news networks. Because we don’t have a TV in my dorm it’s really rare that I watch something on a TV set.

 

 

4. How do you think new technologies will further change T.V. viewing habits?

With a development of internet television more and more people will use it. It is convenient because we can “skip a network broadcast and still watch our favorite TV”(Campbell, 199) Also, now it allows people interact with each other during the TV shows via online chats where everyone can share their thoughts about new episodes of TV shows or News (technopedia).

Work Cited

1.Campbell, Richard, Martin, Cristopher, and Fabos, Bettina. Media and culture: mass communication in a digital age. Bedford/St. Martin’s:2015

2.www.technopedia.com

 

Radio is one of the most important components of mass media. It’s a quick way to get information without “wasting your time” (it doesn’t actually require you to sit and read or to watch a TV)

 1. How much radio do you listen to?
To tell the truth, I don’t listen to a traditional radio at all. Only when I go home where I have a car I can sometimes turn the news for like 5 min just to get a general information about current events. Sometimes I listen to a digital radio such as Pandora, but again, I don’t do it really often. However, I listen to podcasts almost every day. I like to listen about political issues on such channels as “NPR Politics Podcast” or “Pod save the world”.

 

2. When do you listen? 

As I already said, the only time I listen to the radio is when I’m driving and I usually listen to podcasts before I go to bed or when I run.

 

3. What attracts you to a particular station?
First – as little commercial as possible! It is terrible when you have to listen about restraints, or shops, or any other absolutely useless things while you’re listening to music. I understand that that’s the way the channels earn money, but the commercial that lasts five minutes is turning a talk show or a music channel into the garbage.
I also don’t like radio stations with pop-music that you can hear almost everywhere. Even if it’s a good song, but you hear it 20 times a day – you start hating it.

 

 

 

4. How has your music taste changed over the past few years
I believe that over the years I’ve become pickier on this issue. In music, I look for something more than just a nice beat. I look for a meaning behind the words. I don’t like dirty music. When I was little and my dad used to listen to classic instrumental music I thought that it’s extremely boring, but now I see that this type of music gives you more satisfaction. It gives you goosebumps. Now I look for a quality in music.

We are surrounded by mass media. We can’t imagine our life without TV or the internet. We spend 24/7 checking our notifications on phones. But do we know how much mass media actually influences our life?

What are the advantages and pitfalls of the media’s appetite for telling and selling stories?

Mass media evolves with us. It depends on current events, politics, and culture. The stories we see on TV are a reflection of our lives and it shapes our views in many ways. It can heal us like it happened after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan when stories helped the society to understand the importance of these events. It can also push us to achieve our full potential, like all these reality shows where people demonstrate their talent and make everyone else believe that everything is possible and even ordinary people can be heroes. It affects us greatly.

Here, however, hides its danger. Like these stories can help to stop a war, it can also begin one. The violence that we see in cartoons like South park or Family guy, passes to the kids who watch this and makes it look OK to punch or insult someone.

As we reach the point where almost all media exist on the Internet in some form, how have our culture and daily lives been affected?

With mass media comes responsibility for the development of our culture. People have to understand that what we see on the internet and TV affects our society. We have to understand that the movie about ballet is different from actual ballet; that graphite we draw on Facebook page is nothing compared to the real art in museums.

Many stories distort trough the prism of pop-culture. What the author meant 100 years ago writing the book may be taken and misquoted by the society.
We take hours of our time to watch some TV series, the memory of which is going to last for a few hours, maybe days, and we lose this time to engage with real art, that was here before us, stayed with us, and will be here long after us. That’s what high culture is.

Do you feel Anchorman is a comedy or does it more closely reflect in the shift in what and how viewers/readers want information?

I believe that Anchorman is an exaggeration of a reality. People like news, they listen to it, they watch it. But the news is all the same: money and politics. People want to see something spicy: fights, tears, sex. They want actions. The question is, how far away from reality this “spice” will bring us.

Introduction

                        A long time ago people learned how to write. At the beginning it was only pictures; people drew animals, food, life and everything that they saw around. Over time, the picture became more complicated and then ancient people invented letters. Every letter meant a subject. However, that was too hard to remember every “letter” because there are a million things around us. Later, they invented letters, that meant sounds. They created words and sentences and from this moment people started their academic education.

When people talk about journalism they think about the invention of writing. But journalism is not just words on paper. According to the dictionary, journalism is “gathering, processing, and dissemination of news, and information related to news, to an audience”(Oxford). It means that it’s not only about writing. People read books to entertain themselves, but we read news articles and watch the news on TV to keep up with current events. In modern society, this is the part of an “educated” person. We are talking about  journalism as about the easy way to know what’s going on in the world. Consequently, this field must develop as fast as our world does. Computers, laptops, smartphones, watches. It is all digital, it all contains the information, it is all easy and, maybe, the digital world is our future. What would our grandparents have said if we could have told them that people would make calls using their watches? Isn’t it crazy to even think about it?

Thereby, the journalism is developing at the same level as our society’s requirements – it is all about technology. However, along with journalism, the journalists must be advanced too. Have you ever heard about blogging? I am sure you have. Now this is very popular; almost every teenager wants to be a blogger. So what do we have? Twitter and Facebook are the new The New York Tribune and The Washington Times? Could these bloggers be counted as true journalists? People from my father’s generation say that the journalism lost its charm and became just a routine. 20 years ago people could sit in their huge chairs with a warm fireplace and read their favorite paper. However now, we check our new on the smartphones:fast, just to get some information. No romantic indeed. Still, there are people who believe that every development is for the best.

For me, as for the future journalist, these questions play a significant role. That’s why I decided to write my research paper, exploring this question. All of the articles presented below develop this question. I chose them because we can see three different perspectives: Rebecca Wyde is a Journalism major who thinks that the future of journalism is the language itself, Michael McGrath is an experienced online editor who claims that paper journalism is dying, and Tom Engelhardt is an author and the creator of his own website who still believe in trusty papers.

Annotated Bibliography

                                     Wyde, Rebecca Sian. “What Is the Future of Journalism?” The   Guardian 15 April 2015: theguardian.com Web. 4 Apr. 2016. 

 The article by Rebecca Wyde, which helped her to win a grant at the University, develops a problem not only of journalism but the language in whole. People all around the world speak so many languages and, reading foreign or maybe world news, citizens of small countries could lose a big portion of meaning during the translation. Wyde believes that “everyone deserves to know what’s happening in our world, and thanks to incredible technological advances, we can now make this a priority”. The author provides an example when British ambassador, who was unable to speak the local language in Namibia, had huge problems in diplomacy. The same with journalism: understanding the differences between people is the way to their hearts which means that journalism is going to be in our lives for a long time.

However, understanding the differences may not be enough. “Technology is often touted as the future of journalism” . With the Internet, people can have quick access to every article but “which these interactions are allowed to take place can ultimately damage credibility: often there simply isn’t time to fact-check or proof-read properly, which can lead to a severe dip in journalistic quality”. So this way we can hurt someone with fast but unreliable information.

According to the author with this new digital world people can show their voices and their opinion. Yes, it may be harder with this amount of blogs, tweets and tumblr posts to find something reliable,  but they have a platform to state themselves. And who knows, maybe these girls who write about some simple things like school days and their relationships with boys are future Diane Sawyer and Kate Adies and that’s how their future starts.

             McGrath, Michael. “Nonprofit News: The Future of American Journalism?” National Civic Review 103.3 (2014): 34-39. Business Source Premier. Web. 4 Apr. 2015.

          Michael McGrath writes an article about his own experience in the firm called I-News. The creator of the firm, Laura Frank, used to work as an editor in a local paper, but when she saw that the paper journalism is dying she decided to create her own project. I-News is an online source that works like a “chat” among the people. If you see the news that you’re interested in, you can leave a feedback and then the editors will adjust the articles based on the feedback. However, this type of comunication has a lot of difficulties. It’s very hard to read every feedback and then the editors have to check if this is truth or not. That way people don’t get the wrong information. The author says that despite that printing journalism is dying, online news is still not developed enough.

                       Engelhardt, Tom. “Are We Living In the Golden Age of Journalism?” The Nation 21 January 2014: TheNation.com  Web. 4 Apr. 2016.

                  In the article by Tom Engelhardt, the author tells about journalism during his childhood and how is it different from now. When he was young, New York had few major papers like The Daily News, The Daily Mirror, The Herald Tribune and a few magazines: Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Look. Then he thought, that this is “the golden era of journalism”. All of these papers run the world, people got news from it and it was hard to imagine life without it. But what do we have now? Thousands of papers and magazines appear in our lives. We have a choice of what to read today. But these papers are still just papers. We read someone’s ideas and thoughts. The main burst happened when we got an online sources. The author says that  “with the rise of the Internet, we’re no longer simply passive readers at the mercy of someone else’s idea of how to organize the worl”.  Now, we can do it by ourselves.

Work Cited

  “Journalism.” Oxford English Dictionary.  2005. p –  354. Oxford English Dictionary. Web. 6 Apr. 2016.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you have anything to hide? Everyone does.

So and this hedgehog from the poem “Hedgehog” by Paul Muldoon, a member of a Visiting Writers Series at Lenoir-Rhyne. The Hedgehogs was told a secret by a snail and will never tell it to the World. He kept it for himself and it will always be covered under the hundreds of spines. Like a person, who has something to hide. But then people come and say “We mean no harm. We want only to listen to what you have to say” (Muldoon). Will you tell them?

My father always says, that if you want no one to know your secrets – don’t tell anyone. Nor your friends or your parents. Because people tend not to keep other’s secret. They don’t think it’s important.

The author wonders “… what a hedgehog has to hide? Why is it so distrust?”, the same as people who thinks that being too guarded and secretive is bad. “[But they] forget the god under this crown of thorns. [They] forget that never again will a god trust in the world”.

Work cited

Muldoon, Paul. “Hedgehog.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 12 Apr 2016

 

 

Every attempt starts with a failure. An article “Shitty first drafts” by Anne Lamont – a member of a Visiting Writers Series at Lenoir-Rhyne – gives us an introduction into the writer’s world where every first draft is something you just “get it down”. She says that the first draft should never see the world and It’s like a clean canvas for your work – you let everything to be on it. Every doubtful word, every stupid phrase, everything that wants to be on it should be here. The author gives an example of her routine days when she was writing food reviews for California magazine. How terrible all of her drafts were but how helpful.

The idea of “shitty first draft” touches every student, but me especially and everyone who wants to be a writer or a journalist and etc. Writing is a long process and if you want to achieve a great result you have to devote lots of time and intensification. In my opinion, it’s extremely important to have at least two drafts or, as Anne Lamont says, even three. Because writing is something that you can and you have to improve all the time. Reading drafts over and over again, changing structures of sentences, changing words and phrases will make any writing better. There is nothing that can’t be improved.

Work Cited

Lamott, Anne. “Shitty First Drafts.” College of Arts & Sciences Writing, Rhetoric & Digital Studies. U of Kentucky, n.d. PDF.  4 Apr. 2016

Writing about Trump’s politic is hard especially for an international student like me, so for this post on one of the articles/stories by Garrison Keillor, who is also one of the authors who is featured in the Lenoir-Rhyne Visiting Writers Series, I’ve chosen his short story “College Days”, published on his website.

Each paragraph is a part of his experience at the University of Minnesota. He started his higher education as a middle-class guy from the farm who has a big dream – to be a writer. At the university “there was no rank, no hazing, no freshman beanies, [they] were all in the same boat.” Amazing, isn’t it? I’m not saying this is completely different now,  that people from the upper class look down on the people from the middle… Actually yes, they do. And this is the funniest think.  As the author says, we all start the University on the same level, we don’t know a lot about our majors, we don’t have an experience. We work our way through tougher, kids who has rich parents and who is the first generation of college students. Not parent’s money makes us better or worse. People who have “sense of vocation”, the passion toward the major, achieve much more than someone who always relies on money.

Garrison Keillor didn’t have any skills for being a writer before the University. However, reading his story you can understand, that doesn’t matter. Having a dream is much more valuable. “I want to be a writer,” the young boy said once. And now the whole world know his as an amazing writer Garrison Keillor

 

Work cited

Keillor Garrison. “College Days. ”Garrison Keilor. garrisonkeilor.com, 16 Mar. 2015. Web. 25 Mar. 2016.

In Anna Altman’s NewYorkTimes blog post  “A College education should include rooming with a total stranger” she explores how good is it for students to share a room with someone you’ve never seen before.

In the article, the author lets us have her research about all negative and positive effects of rooming with a total stranger. She says that college is a great part of everyone’s life where people have to learn  not only how to solve math problems or analyze a piece of literature but also how to communicate with other people. It will help students with their personal life and with their work. The author says, that”Life with someone who differs from you marks a tremendous opportunity for impressionable young people to expand horizons and open eyes in extremely important ways».

However, there is an opposite opinion considering this problem. The author says, that some people claim that a person should be allowed to choose his or her roommate because college is a very stressful place, where students have to have a calm place, like their rooms, which they can share with someone who is close to him/her.

Now, more and more universities try to hire companies like RoomSynk, which suppose to help freshmen to find «a perfect roommate» – a person whom the student can get along with. It is easier not only for actual students, who can choose someone with the similar interests but also for universities, which don’t have to worry about moving people around. However, is it really necessary?

Interesting, how this problem touches different people. On the one hand, I understand, that it would be fun to get to know new people and try to communicate with them. I consider myself as a non-conflictive person who can live with anyone(except someone who leaves her hair everywhere). For example, our tennis team is very diverse and I have to cope with everyone; I don’t have any problems with it. Plus, it expands person’s horizon if he or she shares a room with a total stranger; it will «get yanks out of your comfort zone, which is, after all, one of the main points of college». After all, college is a new life, kind of «blank space» where you can change everything. What can be better than changing your whole environment?

On the other hand, stressful exams, long papers and grope projects will definitely «yank students out» of their  zones and maybe all they will want is to be with someone who knows them.  Moreover, University  provides tons of opportunities when people can make friends. Classes are also a good place to start talking to someone who can be your friend in the future. As we can, not only a room is a place to find friends.

Talking about me,  I kind of chose my roommate.  In July, our coach told us that we definitely will be live with someone from the team so we will have the same schedule(and this is an amazing thing, that you don’t have to wake anyone if you have a practice at 6 am). My roommate, Sara, she is from Kazakhstan texted me and said that wants to live with someone who speaks Russian and, as there are only two people who have this ability, we live together. And you know, I like it. I like that I live with a person who has the same mentality as I do. I don’t have to select my words accurately with her, I can just tell her whatever I want. Moreover, it’s nice to hear Russian speech sometimes; it reminds me of home.

In conclusion, I don’t understand why is it so important? University is the place to study, and a room hasn’t a huge effect on it. Besides, I absolutely don’t want anyone to make me live with a total stranger. Personally for me, living here, in the USA, 1000 miles away from home is already a totally new experience and as much as a want to pretend that I don’t miss my parents and my country,  probably I do, and I am glad having someone who reminds me of where am I from. That is why putting everyone in the same category is wrong; there are people who wants to shake their lives off and there are someone who don’t. Making students do something is never a solution. Let them decide.

Work Cited

Altman, Ann. “College Education Should Include Rooming With a Stranger.”  The New York                                                           Times. OP-Talk, 7 Sept. 2014. Web. 27 Jan. 2016.

The poem “Snow day” by Billy Collins illustrates a bright, silent winter morning with a snow carpet, fresh frosty air, and author’s winter routine when he finds out that everything is closed and he has the whole day for himself.

What would any of us do this day, hewn “the landscape vanished” (3) and a “white flag waving over everything”?(2)  The poem creates amazingly cozy feelings. As for me, it feels like home. Reading the poem, I think about boundless Russian fields, covered with crystal-clear snow, shining under the sun; about trees, which are like porcelain figures inhabiting these fields. It’s all so lonely and peaceful. Everything is asleep – people, buildings, nature – and the author begins to wonder, ”How was it, before the snow?” All usually crowded places where “the children hide all day” (31), “where they letter and draw” (32) now are under the snow. It muffles the sound, leaving the silence. Now, this silence is the life where the author has to find himself again. Now it’s going to be the real him. Without all this daily buzz around, people can hear the hearts, the thoughts, the truth.

For me, the poem contains something holy in the line “I will put on some boots and step out like someone walking in water” (11-12). It reminds of Jesus, who once walked upon the water and left his step in history forever. He, the author,  is also leaving his steps where no one before him did, like any of us do starting something new, something scary, but something so amazing, like this endless snow under our feet.

The snow has won. In the words «white flag»(2), «world fallen»(10)  and «willing prisoner» we can see clearly, that the author describes this day as a result of the great battle between our routine life and this clear, engrossing snow, which has destroyed everything, and left the blank space.