Author: Juan Monroy

The Stone Cutter

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In class, I told the story of The Stonecutter, a story that I told from memory to demonstrate how in an oral society, stories were passed on as myths and proverbs. The actual content of the text is not important but the theme or lesson is.

You can read a version of the story here and another version here.

The way the story was remembered and passed on was probably by using a mnemonic device that incorporate each step of the Stonecutter’s transformation. The step went something like this:

  1. Stonecutter
  2. King in one story; and a Rich Man in another
  3. Sun
  4. Cloud
  5. Wind
  6. Mountain
  7. Stonecutter

In my version, I had forgotten about the king/rich man, but I did more or less tell you the same story even if I hadn’t told you the exact same words.

The details were less important than the message, which I believe sticks with you because it is a proverb.

Carolee Schneeman Delivers the 5th Annual Experimental Lecture at NYU

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Schneemann email

“Where did I make the wrong turn?”

by Carolee Schneemann

The 5th Annual Experimental Lecture
Presented by the Departments of Cinema Studies and Undergraduate Film & Television

Wednesday, September 17th, 6:15pm
Michelson Theater
Department of Cinema Studies
721 Broadway, 6th Floor

Carolee Schneemann is a visual artist and moving image maker known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. She has been a leader and provocateur in the American avant-garde community since the mid 1960s when she created her groundbreaking performance Meat Joy. From Interior Scroll to Plumb Line to Mortal Coil to Vespers Pool, Schneemann’s work pushes form and consciousness like no other artist working today. Ever since Fuses (1965), her landmark exploration of the female body, Schneemann has pushed visual perception in radical directions that awe, disturb and mystify audiences.

In her Experimental Lecture, Schneemann travels backwards and forwards in time. Beginning with obsessive childhood drawings of a staircase, she will analyze recurring formal properties in her film, sculpture and installation work. The mysteries of a notched stick, paper folds, indentations, the slice of line in space are followed as unexpected structural motives, up to and including her recent photographic grids and objects.

(Via @CinemaStudies)

Statistical Abstract of the United States available at Queens College Library

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Professor Joanna Miller of the Queens College Sociology department asks:

Do you understand how to find and integrate quantitative evidence into their papers and presentation?

You can locate statistics on a variety of subjects through a new online subscription to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, on the Queens College website. You can also find links to reports on these subjects.

Tables in the Abstract inform a vast array of substantive topics appropriate to virtually any course. Most papers/presentations would benefit from data on current trends. Even assignments in which students write personal narratives could place their experiences in a relative context. Tables can be downloaded into Excel and copied directly into papers or graphs constructed within Excel.

The Abstract is located on the QC library website under Find Databases. Go to the letter “S” and scroll down to the bottom to the Statistical Abstract of the U.S. Note that using this resource from off-campus computers requires that you login with the bar code on the back of your Queens College ID card.

Media Technologies students: can use these data in many courses, even if you don’t use it in our class.

(Joanne Miller via Socrates mailing list.)

Courses for Fall 2014

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Greetings Internaut!

My name is Juan Monroy, and this the course notes blog for the courses I teach. Throughout the semester, I will be posting announcements, relevant news, and other timely information that relates to our class. Please visit often and feel free to comment.

If you’re enrolled in one of my courses, or are considering enrolling, please review the courses I am teaching this Fall 2014 semester.

Course School Day and Time Course Website
Introduction to Media Industries Fordham University, Lincoln Center Mon and Thu, 2:30 – 3:45 http://juanmonroy.com/mediaindustries
Introduction to Electronic Media Fordham University, Lincoln Center Tuesdays, 2:30 – 5:15 http://juanmonroy.com/electronicmedia
Media Technologies CUNY Queens College Wednesdays, 6:30 – 9:20 http://juanmonroy.com/mediaindustries
Experimental Film Pratt Institute Thursdays, 5:30 – 8:20 http://juanmonroy.com/experimentalfilm

If you have any questions about these courses, please email me at juan@juanmonroy.com.

Light Industry Screens Maya Deren and Sharon Lockhart on August 26

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CRI 112998

Light Industry in Brooklyn will be screening two films this coming Tuesday, August 26.

  1. Maya Deren’s A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945, 16mm, 3 min.)
  2. Sharon Lockhart’s Goshogaoka (1997, 16mm, 63 min.)

The two films, despite being produced in very different contexts and over fifty years apart, employ film to study the various possibilities of how the human body moves. We even explore some of the “impossibilities,” too.

Two Classes Cancelled, But Taking Over a New One

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Due to low enrollment, two classes I was scheduled to teach this coming fall at Fordham University, Lincoln Center have been cancelled. The Broadcast Industry and Digital Media and Cyberculture were classes that were either rarely offered or have never offered before to undergraduates, according to my source in the Communication and Media Studies department.

Apparently, the college is aggressively canceling classes with fewer than ten students enrolled, even for advanced 3000-level courses, and because my classes had only single-digit enrollment numbers, they were erased.

But as two doors close, another opens. The department finds itself needing someone to teach another course, TV News and Today’s World, apparently with plenty of paying customers enrolled. I will be taking over the course this fall.

Look for the syllabus to be posted on my website at the end of this summer.

What’s on the Final Exam?

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For years, students have asked me, “what’s on the final exam?” I usually offer a vague answer along the lines of “questions on everything we covered since the midterm,” but in the interest of trying something new, here’s a breakdown of exactly what will be on the midterm, including the subject of each question.

The final exam will consist of four parts, covering material from the entire course. The four parts are: true-false, multiple-choice, identifications, and short answers. Material from before the midterm will only appear on the first two (objective) sections, and the exam will favor material from after the midterm exam. Moreover, the questions on material from before the midterm exam will be more general in scope that questions on material from after the midterm exam.

True-False

There will be ten (10) questions on the following topics from the course, each worth two points.

  1. magazines
  2. broadcast radio
  3. magazines
  4. Internet
  5. broadcast radio
  6. telephone
  7. Internet
  8. television
  9. writing
  10. writing

Here’s an example of such a question:

1. Machine-made paper, developed in the 1830s, made books more expensive because they were of a higher quality.

  • True
  • False

Multiple Choice

There will be ten (10) questions on the following topics from the course, each worth three points.

  1. recorded sound
  2. radio technology
  3. motion pictures
  4. telephone
  5. radio technology
  6. broadcast radio
  7. radio technology
  8. telephone
  9. Internet
  10. Internet

Here’s an example of such a question:

2. Which of the following was the first commercially viable use for radio waves?

  1. high-power ovens
  2. wireless telegraphy
  3. wireless telephony
  4. mass broadcasting

Identification

Like the midterm exam, these questions require you to define or identify each term or phrase and describe its relevance to the history and culture of mediated communication. There will be five (5) questions, each worth five points. Your response should be about two-to-three sentences in length.

  1. recorded sound
  2. television
  3. motion pictures
  4. broadcast radio
  5. Internet

Here’s an example of an identification.

3. ARPANet

Short Answer

There will be four questions, of which you will answer three (3) with a two-paragraph response, about six to eight sentences. Each question is worth ten points each.

  1. television
  2. telephone
  3. motion pictures
  4. Internet

Here is an example of a short answer question:

4. Discuss how the development of movable type printing led to the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution.

Remember to use the outlines that I posted on the course website for studying. If understand those outlines, you should be fine. If you don’t understand something, look it up in the readings or even search the web. As a last resort, email me or the class list to verify something.

Good luck.

The Internet Before the Web

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Last night we surveyed the development of computer technology throughout the twentieth century.

  1. The fundamentals of all computers, including bits and bytes
  2. Storage media, including punch cards, magnetic and optical media
  3. Processors to count the bits, including diodes, transistors, and microprocessors
  4. Computers from military mainframes, corporate minicomputers, and personal microcomputers
  5. Networking platforms, including military LANs and WANs, ARPANet, Ethernet, Bulletin Board Services of the 1980s, and the Internet

By 1993, a dedicated base of computers, ranging from military personal, university researchers, and computer hobbyists were using personal computers, networked together through a large computer network of networks, the Internet. The World Wide Web wouldn’t take off until after the first graphical browser, Mosaic.

But that’s not to say that some popular uses for the Internet weren’t around. People were exchanging vital documents, they were shopping for music, they were forming communities, they were accessing libraries of information, they were producing asynchronous radio programs, and they were even video conferencing.

In this 1993 episode of a long-running television series, The Computer Chronicles, we see some of the early uses of the Internet before the World Wide Web.

New Media, Spring 2014, Final Review

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To make up for the cancelled class, due to the various winter storms, please take about a half hour to watch the following review I prepared last week.

The video covers the format for the final exam and the material the exam will cover. The exam will consist of five identification questions and three essay questions. Remember that our final exam will be on Wednesday, May 7, at 9:00 AM.

In the video I also summarize the thirteen chapters you presented in the second half of the class. Those readings include the following chapters:

  1. Howard Rheingold, “Crap Detection 101: How to Find What You Need to Know and How to Decide If It’s True”
  2. Rhiengold, “Social Digital Know-How: The Arts and Science of Collective Intelligence”
  3. Douglas Rushkoff, “Be Yourself”
  4. Siva Vaidhyanathan, “Googlization of Us”
  5. Vaidhyanathan, “Ways and Means: Faith and Aptitude and Technology”
  6. Lee Raine and Barry Wellman, “Networked Relationships”
  7. Eli Pariser, “The User is the Content”
  8. Pariser, “Adderall Society”
  9. Clay Shirky, “Gin TV and Cognitive Surplus”
  10. Shirky, “Means”
  11. Evgeny Morozov, “How to Break Politics By Fixing It”
  12. Morozov, “The Perils of Algorithmic Gatekeeping”
  13. Lawrence Lessig, “Property”

Finally, I wish you good luck with this and your other exams. See you on Wednesday.