Here are three suggestions for ways to employ the analytics and terms of the first few readings to examine television that you are particularly compelled or fascinated by (or openly detest, for that matter) and feel the itch to blog about to your peers. What TV has been on your mind since you viewed it?
Consider using any of these prompts if you feel stuck:
- Describe potential dominant, negotiated, and oppositional readings of this TV text (or a small portion of it). How and why do you imagine these varying readings might differ? What might considering a scene or episode or character arc from different angles help us understand about how this text functions, circulates, and the various interpretations it potentially invokes?
- Briefly analyse the aesthetics of a TV text. Now explore the text’s ideological content. How do these two–form and content–work together? When and how might they work at odds? How do the aesthetics, the use or bending of genre conventions, and the narrative structure shape and inflect the text’s prevailing (if perhaps sometimes conflicting) messages? How might an ideological analysis of this text cause us to reevaluate the work of the text’s form?
- Choose a short segment of your flow notes to analyse in more depth. How in comparing the parts of this segment of flow (which might include advertisements, appeals, network branding, news items, and other interstitials or layers of graphic content as well as the dramatic/comedic/reality/etc. content) do you understand the larger mediated experience constructed for television consumers differently than if you just focused on analyzing a discrete television text in isolation?
You are also welcome to simply find one striking concept or quote from one of the readings and use it to better think through the TV you want to write about, or use this as a venue to profoundly disagree with the perspective and provide us with TV evidence of how it’s not applicable across the board.
In general: Write blog posts that you would click on and read all the way through if you saw them linked on social media. Write about TV that gets you curious, while stretching your critical muscles and keeping it relevant to the class!
Here’s an example of one online platform for pop cultural criticism, if you want to get a sense of the rhetorical style common to this medium: https://www.avclub.com/
And here, by the way, is how to make a link. Hover over the content you want to link and click the link button shown below:
Happy blogging!
