Culture is Ordinary: Recent Episodes
Ravindra Mohabeer
This podcast about Media and Cultural Studies is something of an experiment. The contributors are senior undergraduate students in a course hosted entirely as a podcast. If you teach, you should try it. It's quite a lot of work but well worth it.
Once you figure out what you think your ordinary life is all about, why not embrace it and find your way forward. What are you waiting for. It's now or never ....
Ok, normal, again. But wait. This time it's new normal ... again. But wait, wait. This time is virtually normal. Aren't we all just living in a simulation? The 'new normal' is just a shift from the old normal that wasn't 'real' to begin with. So wasn't it only virtually normal and this is a new virtuality?
Ok. So the whole episode isn't just about sneakerheads but a good chunk of it is. Not so much fan boi-ing about sneakers, but talking about why such ordinary things can become elevated to being so much more.
Have you ever said the phrase "that was my childhood" after having a media experience? How can we think of our media exposures from our early years AS our childhoods?
The whole idea of 'auto-mediation' sounds fancy, but it really boils down to asking yourself where media ends and you begin and vice versa. Do media provide us the whole picture and, if not, why and how do we fill in the blanks?
Are you keeping it real or just putting on a face for your fans and followers? What does it mean to be your 'true self' these days?
Real. Virtual. Simulation. Who can tell anymore? In this episode we consider the idea of 'online' as a state of the 'real.'
Don't call me a nerd. Wait, we want to be nerds now. How do we reconcile the shifting social group once called Nerd to the 'nerding' of mainstream culture?
When we set out to talk about fourth wave feminism and media and feminism more broadly, our conversational took a much more context rich turn. We started from struggling around definition and worked toward representation of women and talked through the idea of feminism in a number of ways.
In this episode we consider (video) games. How to 'read' a game is more than just textual. How is it made? Who is it for? How do we value the act of playing and the (financial) rewards on the 'consumer' and the 'maker' ends?
Why do people share pictures of bread, pornographically? Is it even 'porn.' In this episode we talk about porn, yes, that porn, and the other kind, too (you know, the kind where you add the word 'porn' to the end of any other word and suddenly it means most-est).
This episode: What difference does representation make? What about racial representation?