An Arguement for the Betterment of the Republic: Final Exam Paper

Grant Tabler
Ian Reilly
AHSS 1090
14 April, 2010

The Third Pill Perspective

The Republic was a work by the philosopher Plato dealing with the governance of an ideal society. It is more than that though. The republic, as a philosophical idea, is the world as it could be; a world that we can all strive for. In this pursuit I would like to put forth an argument for the betterment of the Republic, a way of bettering our own world. Our society, in this age of digital media, is inundated with information. The downside is we often do not have a lot of perspective to go with it. We tend to take information at face value without analyzing it. We then end up making bad decisions based on this lack of information. To survive in this haphazard media landscape we need to look at not only what information we take in but how we attain that information. To do this, I purpose what I will call the third pill perspective.

Reality Simplified: Term Paper

Term Paper for my most recent Reilly course, the only courses that currently assign one.

Grant Tabler

Ian Reilly

AHSS 1090

31 March 2010

Reality Simplified

At some point in the early twenty-first century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marvelled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI. –Morpheus from The Matrix

This statement, from the movie The Matrix, has interesting implications for our current society. For, we too are a society that, given the technologies of the new millennium, has fundamentally changed our ways of seeing and interpreting reality. Our reality remediates the information of the past, in much the same way as The Matrix’s machine implemented reality did within its own context. The machine implemented reality of The Matrix, is a remediation. As much as an email or ebook remediates their print medium. The Matrix system however, does this with reality itself. The machines’ matrix is a remediation at its core level because it is the process of sending or conveying the same information through a different medium and using different senses than the original source. This system is a remediation of reality because it conveys the information of reality without the tangible objects; it is delivered without the use of any senses. Reality simplified. The reality of The Matrix establishes itself as remediation through its similarity to other remediations, its use of immediacy and hypermediacy, and its adaptation of information into a new form.

A Whole Blue World

This is my Media adaptation project, Blue Media.

Though the group essay wasn't quite awe-inspiring, and will probably be the main affectation for likewise less than stellar grades (if indeed it has such an effect), I am still quite happy with my video as I had total control of it. Enjoy.



This project was an interesting one for it allowed me, as all projects should, to elaborate on feelings which I otherwise would perhaps have left unexplored. The point of this video, though I hope it's at least somewhat evident from the later parts of the video and the McLuhan quotes, is to raise awareness for the effect of the media environment we exist within. It is also to illustrate the point the McLuhan quotes make about media acting as environments. We are enveloped by them and often don't realize how much of ourselves is vested in these pervasive media.

The video is an adaptation of the song Blue by Eiffel 65. The change is in the reinterpretation of the lyrics. Instead of this being about depression, I have interpreted it as being about media. It's not that the character's life is filled with sadness, it is that this character's life is filled with media. All of the lyrics have come to represent their media representations. Such as the Blue Window being a "media window" such as TV with news media.

This adaptation, to quote my formal writing about it,
"required the creation and implementation of a wide variety of pictures, and video clips. The adaptation was created by looking at and listening to the lyrics of the song “Blue” quite extensively. The repetition in the lyrics allowed for a several interpretations of the best way to portray the media equivalent of each of the song’s lines. The video required the manipulation of many of the items shown within. For example, the culture jamming of the “Educated Decisions made simple” Acer Ad was one that was created exclusively for the video.

Some of the images were either a combination of several pictures, such as with the man in front of the large news media logo. And some of the images were fabricated entirely such as the keyhole of news networks looking onto the earth, which was used for the final iteration of the blue window lyric. The creation of the video took many hours of editing though the more difficult part was definitely attempting to find proper media representations for the experiences mentioned as being part of this blue little guy’s life."

Home Ice Advantage

Grant Tabler

Professor Evans

AHSS 1080

6 April, 2010

Home Ice Advantage

            The Olympics are an event of epic proportions. It is an arena of athletic achievement unrivalled by any single sporting championship, one fuelled by national pride. However, along with national pride comes a sense of favouritism, not just for the athletes of your country, but also for athletes of your chosen sport. When the winter Olympics begin anywhere Canada’s bias is set squarely on Hockey, never was this truer than in the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. The darker side to this national pride is the advertising capitalization. Coca-cola released a commercial for the Vancouver Winter Olympics aimed at unethically exploiting national pride in order to boost sales of Coke.

Film Studies Essay

Grant Tabler

0676441

Essay #2

Film Study AHSS 1070 Section 01

Prof. Don Moore

1 April 2010

Reimagining Film through Stylization Variation 

            The film is a medium in constant flux, with genres that can change and reinvent themselves on a consistent basis. However, sometimes Films become placid and fall into a rut of recreating the same type or style of film ad nauseam. Often this leads to a reimagining of style, such as with movements like the French New Wave and Dogme95. The style of these films is has many noticeable similarities, though they are defined by their stylistic differences. These movements are aimed at telling their story in an impactful way, with varying degrees of success. The French New Wave stylization of sound, and aesthetics in Godard’s Breathless (Godard, 1960) made the film far more impactful than the lack of such stylizations in Von Trier’s Dogme95 film Breaking the Waves (Von Trier, 1996)

Reflection Essay

Reflection Essay on a course I had found mostly dry and redundant. It is evidently difficult for me to put forth a meaningful reflection that forced me to fill a minimum of 2000 words.

Grant Tabler

Stacey Johnson

MDST 1030

23 March 2010

A Reappraisal of My Way of Seeing

            Images are a way in which we define ourselves culturally. Our society is one that constantly endeavours to classify and catalogue the world around us through various media. With this in mind, a project to group together a series of images for scholarly commentary seemed appropriate for a journal in a Visual Culture class. An essay which reflects on the process of commenting on the images, a meta-reflection even, seemed somewhat less appropriate to myself and I’m sure others in this class, whether concerns of this type are raised or not. For, writing about writing always seems like a superficial endeavour. Despite any scepticism I may have towards this way of writing I shall, none the less, attempt to reflect on my visual journal with all the objectivity I can.

Regarding Term Paper

This is a superbowl commercial I found while doing another project recently, in another class for Ian, the same teacher who started us on these blogs actually. Anyway, although I'm sure there are thousands of examples of my term paper's point I particularly like this one as it seems to be my term paper "remediated" into video form. Funny that I found it while doing a project on remediation.



I found this video spoke to my term paper because it has all the same aspects. Everyone on the street is separated from each other, despite their proximity they're all in their own worlds. I found it particularly ironic in the scene where a woman is having trouble getting a stroller up a flight of stairs, a man sitting on the stairs on his laptop changes into his avatar which happens to be a superhero. Yet despite his media imagining of superhero status he still ignores, or cannot see the woman in need of help in the real world.

The following scene shows an interesting event as well. There is a kid sitting with his dog. The kid is in his own world using his PSP for some type of racing game, and the dog is just sitting and watching him with his ball. The dog rolls the ball to his would-be walker though to no avail, the owner is trapped in their media cocoon.

Coca-cola is quite clever with their final scene though. They not only show an almost Mcluhanist warning of media immersion, they also made a solicitation of their product by showing coca-cola as the only thing truly powerful enough to free people from their media-trance.

Though I suppose I can understand how the two characters both somehow ordered the same drink at that internet cafe esque location. The final exterior shots shows us that for some reason the internet cafe has a giant coca-cola logo on the roof rather than a name for the cafe. I guess the drink choices could be a bit limiting in that case.