Week One Summary
Whew! I made it to my summary post. I think that this week has been huge learning experience for myself in this class, in both the social media and noir.
Setting up all of the different social media accounts I found incredibly stressful. Even though I had heard of soundcloud and flickr before, I had never actually used them, and navigating a bunch of new websites at the same time was a bit confusing, but I pulled through and was able to uploaded fun pictures to flickr
and also explore other users uses of SoundCloud too.
Now, I already had a Youtube, Twitter, and a WordPress, but I didn’t really use them in the way that we are using them for this class. I was more of a bystander on social media, using my accounts to comment and look at other peoples’ posts. So that was an unanticipated challenge learning how to be more of an active user on those medians. Also, I learned I am very indecisive when choosing titles and designs for my profiles. But I did enjoy combining all of these separate medians into my introduction post.
On noir, I really didn’t know anything about noir until I read the articles and checked out the examples of noir provided. I had heard of people mentioning film noir, but I never really understood to what it was referring. I enjoyed the articles introducing noir and how the styles and themes are defined. I was very excited to learn that it came from German expressionism, because I have learned and watched German expressionist movies like “Nosferatu” and “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, in 2 of my German courses, so it was nice to see the connection between the two.
I really enjoyed watching the examples of noir, especially Scooby Doo. It was nice to see all of the stylistic and thematic aspects of noir in the televison episodes. But I thought the podcast, Welcome to Night Vale gave me more of the noir vibe I had been expecting. The narration almost made it feel like a 1940s noir film, even without the visuals that the TV shows had. This feeling started leading me away from my previous thinking that noir meant always having the black and white film with the dimly lit room. So I guess I am becoming more open minded in what I classify as noir. Who knows what previous opinions I will reconsider next week?