Write a memoir of a moment of discovery that changed your perception of yourself, of others, or of the world around you.
Month: December 2012
Urban Dialogue
Imagine you are sitting on a very crowded public city bus. The large and aggressive-seeming person next to you keeps demanding in an obnoxious was that you move over to make more room, You can’t move over and there is nowhere else to sit or stand in the bus. Write the dialogue that might take place in those circumstances.
Canadian Ritual
Write a personal essay about a guest from another country who comes into your home. Specify a typically Canadian ritual in which your guest might participate, and suggest how he or she might perceive it.
National News
Spend a week carefully observing news stories covered by the televised CBC news The National (10 or 11 p.m.) and the print daily newspaper The National Post.
Which stories were covered on TV, which significant stories were only in the newspaper? Which medium provided the deepest and most thorough coverage of particular events?
Write a post about your comparison and conclusions.
Reduce the Chance of War
Formulate a list of specific recommendations for political and social changes that might reduce the chance of war. Referring to current events in the world today evaluate the likelihood of such political and social changes coming about.
Artificial Perceptions and Arbitrary Values
Analyze your current experiences with some feature of the Interent using McLuhan’s ideas.
Marshal McLuhan died in 1980.
“All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values.” Marshall McLuhan
“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.” Marshall McLuhan
“The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.” Marshall McLuhan
“Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness.” Marshall McLuhan
Rabindranath Tagore
Read about Rabindranath Tagore. Read something from the writings of Rabindranath Tagore.
Read the Introduction to Gitanjali by W.B. Yeats. Read Gitanjali.
Write a post in which you explore the idea that “children gather pebbles and scatter them again.”
Create your own photo-poster from a brainy quote of Rabindranath Tagore.
Futuristic Story
Write a futuristic story in which you present your vision of life twenty years from now.
Read an interview with Derrick de Kerckhove, author of The Augmented Mind.
How will people in the future be “always on” or “plugged in”? What will “cloud computing” look like in twenty years? What “next big thing” will replace Facebook?
How many “degrees of separation” will exist between you and your friends, your family, your children, your spouse?
How will people use their imagination twenty years from now? Will they still have one?
Kerckhove says we exist in “the era of the tag” and “tagging … is the soul of the Internet.” What remains to be tagged in the next twenty years? What will the Internet be like in twenty years?
Will one of the oldest forum threads on the Internet still exist in twenty years? “I am lonely will anyone speak to me”?
In the Style of a Monty Python Script …
Using a Monty Python script as a template, create a humorous dialogue in which one party is trying to accomplish a serious end, while the other is distracted by inconsequential details. Make your arguments as absurd as possible. Record your dialogue as a podcast.
Newspaper Advertising
Newspapers have changed considerably in the past 30 years, specifically in response to other media, such as television and the Internet. Using a recent copy of a newspaper as a resource, compare and contrast the advertising and visual techniques of the newspaper with those in other media forms such as magazines and the Internet?In what ways have other media forms influenced newspaper advertising? In what ways have newspaper advertisements remained unique?