“Waddling like a cocksure duck,” as one commentator at the Dangerous Minds site put it, Pike with his blithe disregard for the multiple still and video cameras trained on him all but ensured that his actions, and his attitude in performing them, would go viral. What resulted was not only Pike’s transformation into a memetic icon but, much more importantly, an object lesson in the potency of citizen journalism as enabled by the internet. […]
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According to the Wall Street Journal, while Justin Bieber is risking life and limb to get away from paparazzi, and Alec Baldwin is punching them out, people with a bit of discretionary income to squander who want to feel like celebrities are hiring photographers to follow them around, surrendering their privacy in order to have a total stranger make pictures of their “special moments” for them. Romantic. […] The unimpeachable post-secondary thesis project proposal may have had its origin in BFA and MFA studio photography programs, as I’ve argued in this series of posts, but its pernicious influence does not stop at the giant egress from the ivory tower, alas. A photo-ed version of what’s known in medicine as iatrogenic disease (an adverse condition in a patient resulting from treatment by a physician or surgeon, or resulting from a stay in a hospital), this highly infectious condition incubates during the academic indoctrination period and then gets carried into the larger world outside. […] Through a chain of what seem to be unconnected circumstances and separate but reasonable decisions, what was once process-oriented became product-oriented, what was once relatively private or en famille became public, and what was once concentrated in the final semester of the senior year expanded in the only direction it could — backward — to infuse the entirety of the students’ experience within the program. If this could happen in a BFA photo program, at a post-secondary level wherein final thesis projects in the arts are not universally considered mandatory, it’s easy to envision the importance they acquire at the MFA level, where they are in fact generally required. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Dog Day Afternoons: Bits & Pieces (2)
If, as recent research indicates, women “objectify” women in exactly the same way that men do, wouldn’t that mean that this isn’t some despicable guys-only behavior, an accusation that goes back to the advent of second-wave feminism in the ’60s? Doesn’t it suggest that forty years of discourse about the dreaded, shameful “male gaze” has been nothing more than ideologically driven blather? […]