Blog Reviews

When one considers the scope of all these blog assignments, from the beginning with an analysis of the media’s role in the Haitian cholera outbreak to the application of film theory to a foreign piece of cinema, the overall goal would appear to be a synthesis of anthropological media theories and an application to specific cases, contemporary and otherwise. Thus, the end result should be a collection of analytical articles on specific media issues using new scholarly knowledge from course materials and our own creative/critical skills. Looking at two blogs from my peers, Riaz Makan’s and Eric Fontaine’s, we can assess their final contributions to the field of media anthropology through the writing of their respective case studies.

Eric Fontaine’s class blog (http://ericfontainemediameditation.blogspot.com), takes a rather personal slant on most the assignments as he seeks to color the scholarly theories and contemporary issues with some of his own, more anecdotal experiences. Such an approach, while not strictly scholarly, makes a valuable contribution to the field, nonetheless, as it provides a distinct, personal take on issues that are usually addressed in more academic means. He does a good job in all his articles of summarizing the key points made by other scholars on the topic at hand. For example, interacting with writers such as Walter Benjamin (in the “Jai Ho” post) and Jaques Lacan (in the film theory post ) in order to provide an academic/critical framework within which he may further discuss the specific cases. Unfortunately, many of these did not go far enough to draw his own opinions together with the academic views on the issues at hand. They are often merely paralleled without an enough critical linkages being made between the scholars’ theories and his own anecdotes. His best developed posts, such as the graffiti based assignment (“Graffiti: you are what you write?”) do develop such interplay and, indeed, perform a strong analysis. Specifically he draws upon academic articles which assert that graffiti is often the ‘true’ voice of a community based on its ability to be expressed anonymously. Then he effectively applies such theories to the chicken-scratched scribblings on the UBC libraries’ desks to do exactly what our blogs are set out to do: provide critical case studies that color the more theoretical discussions gleaned from the class materials.

Riaz Makan’s blog (http://rmakan.blogspot.com/) makes a consistent and concerted effort to provide anecdotal, theoretical, and contemporary examples that both illustrate his own take on media functions and lend specific illustrative cases to the theoretical work done by other scholars. Principally, after reading the whole of the blog, Makan seems to be interested in cultural flows and subsequent remediation of foreign and local cultural capital through our own personal media creations. These discussions would appear to be informed largely by the writings of Walter Benjamin (“The Work of Art....”) and Arjun Appadurai (“Global Ethnoscapes...”). For example, in his post on the aboriginal use of radio to create community he is careful to delineate the difference in flow of mass culture and mass radio (i.e. one way, from station to listeners around the world) versus the interplay and truncated, regional flow of community radio stations such as CBQM. Furthermore, in his discussion of the “Jaan Pehechaan Ho” he traces levels of cultural “equivalence” between appropriate and inappropriate recreations of foreign media products (i.e. the songs and dances of Bollywood). His concerns are also traced through the “Jai Ho” post where he makes it clear that ‘why’ something is being remade is critical to its acceptance as well. In the modern age of global cultural flow we must take care not to simply remake things because they are popular or ‘fun’ but because we want to express some sort of deeper connection to the original medium.