You, at Stanford University, will each be paired with a "cyber-chum" from Lynne Joyrich's Television Studies class at Brown University. After collaboratively choosing a broad topic to explore, you'll each pose and then answer four related questions about different aspects of television. You'll have from November 22 through Thanksgiving break to work on this. By December 1, you'll post the interview, along with your response to it, to a joint website,http:/
Monday, November 15
Contact information for your partner will be handed out by email. You should communicate over the course of the next week with some ideas for a theme and settle on a subject of shared interest. This subject might be a genre (e.g., reality TV, soap operas); an audience group (e.g., children, a fan community); a TV trend (e,g,, internet viewing, serialization); or a social issue related to media (e.g., globalization, violence). Email correspondence should work fine for this purpose, but you're also welcome to use a platform like Facebook or Google docs for your discussion.
Monday, November 22
Four substantial questions (50-100 words each) are due to your cyber-chum (with each of you writing your own set of questions for the other to answer, even though both sets of questions tie to the same broad theme on which you have agreed). Further, though all of the questions should be related to your theme, the four questions should engage the different dimensions of TV that we've studied. Thus, in each of your sets, there should be one question for each of the following areas:
- TV as a cultural and technological form
- TV's stylistic, rhetorical and narrative form
- TV viewing and consuming
- TV and social formations
Monday, November 29
Substantial responses to the questions (100-200 words each) due to your cyber-chum.
Wednesday, December 1
Write up a reaction (about one double-spaced page) to your partner's answers. Here are some questions you could consider:
- How would you characterize the overall import of these opinions?
- Was the response about what you expected, or did anything surprise you?
- Do you agree or disagree; and did you find that your experiences match up or not?
- Based on the interview, do you and your partner have similar or different TV viewing habits, pleasures, and understandings?
- What larger implications or new perspectives on the course material does this text suggest?
- What is suggested by the very fact that we have TV in common and can discuss it, via digital media, across geographical distances?
You should post the text of the interview with your reaction to posterous by noon PST. You'll be added to the blog as a contributor, so you can just email a document to [redacted]. For more details, seehttp:/
Check out your classmates' projects, and we'll discuss them in our final class! We also encourage you to comment on the various projects on the blog itself; in this way, the conversations begun with this project can continue!
