New York

I’ve been thinking about what I want from NYU – I think much of my frustration with the trip (and I still just think of it as a trip…) has to do with the force of a place and people and the intellectual meekness with which I feel I am approaching leaving this life. When I talk about New York with people, I’m uncomfortable with the degree to which the city is mythologized as a place of maturation – a city living up to itself, and I don’t’ want to have to live up to Simon and Garfunkel when I move there. My way of coping has been to emphasize how I want to focus on school and my more explicit education at NYU. So, in the process of talking about what I want from moving, I’m compling a list of questions I want answered while still in school.

The power of reading as a social process in relationship to media systems. I think that the move for media literacy, the use of satire, and the transformation of consumption into an ethical process are connected by the transformation of reading skills into sources of social capital. I want to investigate these as a linked process that concern the dominance of certain media forms.

Media ecology and its link to social spaces in the city – do certain media forms validate or enable spatial structures of the city?

Media ecology and its link to aesthetics/persuasion

Gender and visual strategies. I want to study gender norms as a function of visual norms, and the assigning of intrinsic meaning to certain appearances. I think TS Khun hinted at this tendency as a function of Cartesian reasoning about the investigation of the world, but what do I know. Gestalt.

The difference between truth and meaning

I want to study visual rhetoric in general, but also to improve my reading of photographs and their persuasive tendencies.

Duncan