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FILM 7.21 - Zombie Media

This is a course guide for FILM 7.21.

Course description

This course develops research and writing techniques enabling students to craft essays for the public sphere. As our starting point, we will examine what it means to live in a media culture suffused with noise that claims to be signal and develop well-supported theses investigating the implications of online digital media. More than a decade ago, the New York Times declared that “the Web means the end of forgetting.” The headline mirrors a common belief that the information era has made media immortal so music, videos, and games put online will always be perfectly stored and instantly findable. If media has been made immortal, though, it is only in the same way a zombie is immortal: falling to pieces and haphazardly lurching forward forever with no sense of direction, unthinkingly causing arbitrary damage to everything around it. Through a scaffolded series of writing experiments we will look at the claim that the internet never forgets and explore how and when it does; learn how and why societies form collective memories around media artifacts; and discuss the ways the weight of over a century of recorded media culture can be both oppressive and liberating to today’s creators. Our classroom discussions will bring together threads of ideas from many different disciplines that students will be expected to merge into persuasive writing targeting specific audiences. This course will provide the flexibility for students to pursue topics of their own interest while building on a scaffolding helping students understand the nature of researching, describing, and writing for public audiences.

[Source: IWR, 02/28/2023]

In the Library's collections

Introductory reading(s)

Selected book title(s)

Other library resource(s)

Finding scholarly articles & journal title(s)

You can find scholarly literature for film and television studies in a variety of journals. However, if you want to do targeted searching, you can use a subject specific database such as Film & Television Literature Index. You can also use the search box at the top of the page.

Citing and Tracking Your Bibliographic References

Use this guide to help you learn how to correctly cite and keep track of the references you find for your research.

Keeping up with Film Studies journal literature

Want an easy way to keep up with the journal literature for all facets of Film Studies? And you use a mobile device? You can install the BrowZine app and create a custom Bookshelf of your favorite journal titles. Then you will get the Table of Contents (ToCs) of your favorite journals automatically delivered to you when they become available. Once you have the ToC's, you can download and read the articles you want from the journals for which we have subscriptions.

You can get the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Don't own or use a mobile device? You can still use BrowZine! It's also available in a web version. You can get to it here. The web version works the same way as the app version. Find the journals you like, create a custom Bookshelf, get ToCs and read the articles you want.