[Air-l] Films/Pedagogy

[D. Silver]

Ooh, good question, Thom, and nice reply Frank.  I hope this thread takes
off.  Thom, if folks respond offlist, would you mind sending a collective
post to the list?

I have two to offer -- one I've used and one I want to use in the near
future:

Office Space (Written and directed by Mike Judge, 1999) depicts the office
culture of a typical new media firm.  In some ways, the film acts as a
filmic version of Dilbert or, better yet, the Net-related Doonsbury
sequences.  The film provides an insider's look into the  interactions and
daily life of a tech company.  The benefit of such a film is to encourage
students to think of the effects of new media *outside* of the wires, the
switches, the servers, and into considerations of work space organization,
e-commerce business strategies, and offline social interactions that
depend on online relationships.  It's also wicked funny.

Startup.com (Directed by Chris Hegedus and Jehane Noujaim, 2001) is a
documentary charting the dramatic rise and spectacular fall of a $40
million Internet company founded by two twentysomething friends.  THIS IS
AN AMAZING DOCUMENTARY.  A key historical text documenting the era of
e-commerce in the mid- to late-1990s (think Alan Greenspan's wonderfully
prophetic phrase "irrational exuberance"), this film would serve as an
outstanding companion piece to texts like Po Bronson's Nudist on the Late
Shift and Douglas Rushkoff's MicroSerfs.  By viewing and discussing
Startup.com, students will be able to recognize new media as not only a
communications medium but also a rhetorical construct, a media hype used
to increase IPOs, inflate investments, and ultimately in many cases create
a surface of mirrors hiding a lack of center.  Good, funky stuff with an
edge.

david silver
http://faculty.washington.edu/dsilver

On 21 Oct 2001, thomas/swiss wrote:

> Hi,
>
> A pedagogical question. Can folks who use films in their internet studies classes offer a list of them, either to this list, or to me personally? Equally important, tho, would be a few sentences of WHY you teach them or HOW you teach them in relation to the issues yr class explores. We all know the ususal suspects: Bladerunner, for example, and those films that disrupt narrative (Time Code) but what other films or videos and why and how? Thanks in advance. Thom Swiss
> thomas-swiss at uiowa.edu