Research Blog 15

The most illuminating parts of my research project were understanding what a subculture is and what subcultures do.  I had no idea that there were actual websites online that had people living a different live inside them.  Inside subcultures you can be anyone you want to be.  The people who were part of mugglenet.com definately lived up to this.  They had a love for Harry Potter and lived in their muggle world and their world of Harry Potter.  It was interesting to me that there are so many different subcultures online and that more people are a part of them than I had realized. 

The most frustrating was finding all the information through the website.  Honestly this class was extremely frustrating to me.  The book was hard to understand so therefore the concepts were hard to understand.  I tried coming to class reguarly at the beginning of the semester but honestly things were never explained clearly and I felt that it was a waste of time considering I felt that I could teach myself the course concepts better than the book or instructor was teaching the course concepts.  I am sad because I thought this class was going to be interesting, but instead it was a huge let down.  At the beginning of the semester we would spend the first half hour of class going over just how to USE the blog, when we could have been going over more popular culture concepts.  The idea of the blog may not be a bad one, but what I do not understand is why you do not just use blackboard's discussion board.  This way you can have blogs on there and also be able to see every persons responses to others.  Basically, you made us spend a ton of time blogging and responding, instead of actually teaching us the concepts of popular culture.  It was not my job to tell you who I responded to, technically that is your job to find.  You are the one who made is so difficult on yourself to figure when people were blogging and who they were responding to, when you could have just let us use blackboard and you could have found the responses easily yourself and they wouldn't have been tampered with by other students deleting them, or just not understanding how to post the blogs accurately.  We would spend so much time talking about gaming, porn, or other absurd things in class that is discusted me.  Really, could we have just had notes and some structure to the class? There was absolutely no real structure or plan for what was going on in our class.

Research Blog 12

My research on the subculture of Harry Potter and the website mugglenet.com is a subculture.  This group of people think differently than other people.  Especially when it comes to Harry Potter.  They are completely submersed in what is going on in the wizarding world and they are engulfed in facts and unknowns of what the next Harry Potter movie is going to be about. There are discussions and postings from many different people and there is also a link to a facebook group with more people who are discussing Harry Potter and living in the subculture of Harry Potter.  These people come from all across the world and come from different backgrounds but they all have the same thing in common, their obsession with Harry Potter and the Harry Potter phenomenon.

Reading Blog 9

I live in a very small town 30 minutes west of Toledo. I have definately noticed that the smaller businesses here suffer in comparison to the larger more commercialized businesses in the larger towns next to mine.  The main thing I have noticed is that our grocery store suffers the most.  Our grocery store actually was shut down for a couple of years because business was bad.  The town next to ours had opened a Walmart and the goods were so much less expensive there than they were at the local small grocery store.  The grocery store did manage to get on its feet and open again but it has still be struggling comparet to Walmart.  I personally try to support the local store as much as possible because it gives people in my community jobs and it is much more convinent than drive 15 minutes to go to walmart.  I think saving in gas saves me the same amount that I would be saving in groceries anyways. 

This chapter talked about vacations of two locations.  One being in nature and one being the expensive route.  My family would definately choose the nature location.  We love to canoe and hike.  Generally when we go on vacation it is to a spot that is peaceful and quiet where we can enjoy leaisure activities with one another.  The atmostphere of being in nature would be the vacation that my family would enjoy the most.

Reading Blog 9 Member responses

Samantha Thompson and Eric.

Reasearch Blog 11

I have not yet acclimated myself to the website.  I am still a little unsure of what I am going to present to the website and how I am going to do so.  I will reblog once I have done this.  I also need to figure out how to go about being a member on my website.

Reading Blog 7 Replies

Sarah and Dustin

Reading Blog #7

When watching the movie Bamboozled I noticed that there was orientalism in it.  It was about Afican Americans only being treated as slaved to the entertainment industry.  They were made to dance and sing and perform for the people.  Representation was also used in this movie.  This movie represented African Americans as being used for one thing which was entertiainment.  They viewed them as being funny and unintelligent characters.