Biting the hand that feeds
At the risk of the aforementioned, I have to share this post from a Cal student's blog, circa 2004. I don't feel bad because it has nothing to do with the really great people I work with, and I have a lot of great students, many of whom have just never been exposed to a lot of things we take for granted. And really, isn't college when you're supposed to find out about things you were never really exposed to? I mean, should I be surprised that a room full of 20 year olds who were 4.0's in high school should know about pirate radio, or who the Zapatistas are? I wouldn't have.Or would I have? Was there an activist sensibility in Surf's Up San Diego in the late 80's? Or was the weather too nice and the water just right? I went to the Che Cafe on campus because they had dirt cheap all you can eat buffets, not cos I knew anything about Che Guevara. But stuff was happening. You just had to look harder. Or care just that bit more to find out about it. I didn't go to Antioch College where friends got degrees in how not to be a sexist. I had to read The Gender Gap and talk about voting behavior before I got to Feminism 102 and those great esoteric debates with friends about whether or not we were a Marxist Feminist or a Socialist Feminist. We sure as hell weren't Liberal Feminists. They were boring and middle class and straight and white and only talked about things like gender gaps.
But back to this student blog post from 2004...
Tho as another friend from UCSD reminded me, we used to whine about the same thing in our department when we were undergrads. It was US vs. the GIRLS WHO WANTED TO BE TV ANCHORS. Are you with me or against me?
So now, here I am, on the other side of the fence, feeling protective of my students and my department, whom I value greatly, yet keenly aware of the stereotype that pervades us on campus. Of course I don't agree with it! It's an unfair tag, and I myself was probably just a snotty lefty student at times. Yet this surprised me still...
+++
an excerpt from a student blog:
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Why didn't anyone warn me about Mass Comm?
I'm an Interdisciplinary Studies Field major (ISF) here at Cal, which means I get to more or less make up my own course of study within some perameters. In my field of concentration, I have chosen to analyze mass media, consumerism, visual representation, and the like in what has proven to be a more intellectually stimulating series of classes than I had expected. I have taken courses in American Studies, Visual Studies, ISF, History of Art, Women's Studies, and now Mass Communications. In addition to learning volumes about consumer culture, advertising, and visual communication, this academic path has taught me another very important lesson:
The Mass Communications department is for lazy students incapable of conducting critical and/or sub-superficial analyses of social issues!
There, I said it. I swear to Baby Jesus, my Mass Comm discussion section is populated by consumer culture apologists who can't comprehend existence outside their own little personal spheres of affluence and complacency. One woman in my class went so far as to claim that, Hey, we're products of overkill 1980s Regean-era regulation-free advertising aimed specifically at unsuspecting children, and we turned out fine.
NO! No we didn't! We're not fine! We all buy way more stuff than we need, we all inject identity into ourselves via commodities, we all thoughtlessly produces tons of garbage each year and waste water and waste paper and waste plastic, and only see a product for its consumptive value and not the productive process that preceeded our purchase of the product! Aggghh!
I was under the erroneous impression that Mass Comm is for people who are interested in critiquing mass communications; it turns out that it's full of Haas rejects who think this is their second chance at a career in advertising and television. So sad.
In short, ISF rocks. People who go into ISF are there because they want to think for themselves. We're the rebels. We dance to our own beat. And we were most likely unpopular in high school.
found at:
http://caljunket.blogspot.com/2004_09_01_caljunket_archive.html
posted by Kate Coyer @ 3:00 PM
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