Task 3 - Essay Proposal

Typography and the power it holds within [pop] culture

/Investigating the effect of typography on pop culture and how pop culture through recent decades has adopted typography and certain typefaces and permanently linked the two.

/ The effect of typography on different trends such as punk and hip hop and how the two are associated with specific typefaces.

/ How different aspects of life are guided by typography, brands, music and politics

/ The philosophies of the subculture that type connotes

/ How subcultures and counter cultures brand themselves using not just imagery but also type

>Gastaut, A. and Criqui, J. (2005) Off the wall: psychedelic rock posters from San Francisco, London, Thames & Hudson.

>Turcotte. B. and Miller, C. (1999) Fucked up + photocopied, Los Angeles, Gingko press.

>Easby, A. and Oliver, H. (2007) The art of the Band T-shirt, London, Simon and Schuster.

>Crimlis, R. and Turner, A. (2006) Cult Rock Posters 1972 – 1982, London, Aurum Press Limited.

or

The 'gaze' and the 'modern man'

I want to base my essay on a point that was raised in the seminar on the gaze, and how are men now becoming more 'watched'. I want to look at the rise in mens fashion and the design that is being produced alongside it and also the effect on advertising.

/ I want to explore how in recent times males have become more image conscious, and how that effects or can be compared to the female gaze, "men watch women, whilst women watch themselves".

/ Have men, maybe specifically metrosexual men (men comfortable with 'taking care of themselves' and looking trendy) now become part of the gaze, is this what women want men to look like or behave.

/Is it still a male controlled environment or have women began to have more power in the media, many editors of magazines are now female.

/ Is they a certain kind a male that fits the active female gaze, or is they're argument for an active male gaze?

Task 2

In all it's 3 volumes 'On popular Music' is an intellectual rant on popular culture and it's music. He begins by devaluing popular music by comparing it to 'serious music' presumably the classical music that he finds tasteful and worthy of enjoyment. He goes on to detail the structure of popular music, "the chorus consists of thirty two bars and that the range is limited to one octave and one note" and that popular music is manufactured for the masses, even how you dance is pre-determined, "The general types of hits are also standardized: not only the dance types, the rigidity of whose pattern is understood".

Adorno's ideology also focuses on the predictability of popular music, stating that it is "pre-digested" and that free-thinking is absent and that the consumer may think that they are choosing to listen to the music and buy the record by their choice it is fact been chosen for them, "keeps them in line by making them forget that what they listen to is already listened to for them"

For a song to be familiarized enough with the masses it needs to become recognized,"Mass listening habits today gravitate about recognition. Popular music and its plugging are focused on this habituation. The basic principle behind it is that one need only repeat something until it is recognized in order to make it accepted".

Duck Sauce's song Barbra Streisand is a strong example of Adorno's theology, it is repetitive and after several second the rest of the song is predictable and pre-digested. The song is so predictable and recognizable that the artists were able to produce a website that imitated their own song and allowed the public to enter their name or other words into the song to replace 'barbra streisand'

http://gobarbra.com/

Task 1

The panopticon was a 18th Century prison where the cells circled a watch tower so that the illusion of surveillance was ever present, this encouraged self regulation and resulted in the prisoners 'guarding' themselves. This theory, panopticism, was used to build prisons, hospitals and schools and was designed by English theorist Jeremy Bentham. This philosophy can and is applied to certain cultures and aspects in modern society.


In the digital age practically everything we do is tracked, monitored or watched, or so we believe. The internet has opened a huge portal into information an knowledge, allowing people to discover anything they want. However, these searches on the internet are logged and every computer and internet connection has an IP address. In relation to Foucault's Panopticism an IP address could be related to the window or barred gate of a prison cell, the entrance whereby activities can be viewed and monitored. A user can therefore be 'googling' a topic or subject and that information is documented under the IP address of that User and this recording can be viewed by the Broadband provider, Police organisation and appropriate Government regulators, but the user is not aware of the viewer. "He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication" The user also never knows who is monitoring their activity, "one sees everything without ever being seen".

This surveillance is set in place due to laws and known online criminal activity, but it also acts as a panopticon and a deterrent to curiosity and keeps the majority of online users in check because they know of the surveillance but they don't know if or when it ceases, "the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so"

The user will consciously behave online and they will purposefully example their behaviour in comments to message boards or on videos and articles, some will even replace swear words with asterixs to be polite. "Hence the major effect of the panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power".

It would be naive to presume that all internet users behaved, but the ones that don't are quickly punished or caught and are examples of reliability and sight of the 'guardian'