Posting assignment #1 (due Sunday 9/15, by 11:59 P.M.; comment by Monday 9/16 by 11:59 P.M.): Read an object!

We've read a lot of cultural objects in class over the past two weeks — including our classroom, Men in Black, Charlton Heston speaking, glasses, phone covers, T-shits, political cartoons, lanyards for new Gophers (and bags of garbage thrown at them), ads, inter-racial couples (in ads), and a LOT of 'hipster' signs….  To read these objects, we have used (and developed) a series of tools, including: 

• keywords (sign/signifier/signified, (social) construction, position, rhetoric, inter-textuality, ideology, hegemony and many more);
• Stuart Hall's Circuit of Culture (production <—> consumption <—> regulation <—> signification <—> identity / position);
• the six aspects of culture (culture is structured, rhetorical, historical, economic, psychological, political), and 
• the text/author/audience triangle to talk about where 'meaning' comes from.

Your assignment, in this first blog post, is to:

1. find a cultural object we haven't looked at in class — anything is fair game (a space, a website, an ad, a word, a thing, a video, etc.), but you'll want to find something you think you can 'read' effectively—not too huge (which leads to generalizations), or too spare (which leads to having little to say).  Hit the 'finding' part hard; good object leads to good ideas;
2. post it — or a link to it, or an image of it, or a description of it — to the blog; and
3. write and post, in the same post just below the object, a 200-300 word reading of the object, in which you describe the position that the object 'argues' you into taking and explain how it does it.  Use at least THREE tools from our work in your explanation. (And guys: remember that these are merely tools, things that help us be clearer, more precise, that structure how we think and write.  They're loose. They overlap.  They aren't like algebra, so you can't 'get it wrong.' Don't dump 'em in like pepperoni on the pizza, just because you were asked to. USE them—in the way we used 'audience' to get at why someone from New York might see the treatment of a 'cabbie' in Men in Black differently from the way it looked to somebody from Pierre, SD or Mogadishu.)

Finally — and this will be the same for every posting assignment — don't forget to come back sometime on Monday, read your colleagues' posts, and make a thoughtful comment on at least one of them.

Primary imperative for all blog posts:  don't bore your friends!  The more fun you have writing these posts, the more fun we'll all have reading them.  Go for the unusual and unexpected — maybe something only you and your small 'subculture' understands, and show how.  And a quick note on style:  blog posts are short, informal pieces of writing, meant for the other people in your Blog Community — no need for introductions, conclusions, citations, any of that 'formal' or 'academic' silliness.  Just jump right in — show us an interesting object, and tell us how it works.