CONTRIBUTORS

Fall 2018

COMM 233A

Sungyeon Ahn

William Andries

Kamal Apatira

Georges Azouri

Faith Blakey

Colleen Kelly

Benjamin May

Pia Ocvirk

Natalie E. Raskas

Helina Samson

Ryan Scott

Sydney Secuskie

Sarah Selzer

Abigail Smith

Griffin Spurgin

Jarrod Stiver

Aleysha Ward

Theresa R. Weigel

Jackson Williams

Joseph S. Zanca

COMM 233C

Caleb Baue

Jonathan Bonilla

Frederick Coudret

Destiney Davis

DaBreonna Doss

Christopher Douglas

Cailey Griffin

Gunter Jaeger

Emmanuel Koutsouras

Yongjie Li

Katharine McLean

Brogan Miller

Joshua Mundell

Richard Pasch

Daniel Scotto

Ryan Smith

Nathan Stapleton

Leda Turpen

Margaret Wagenbrenner

Kenneth West

Disney Princesses: A system of commodities?

Disney Princesses: A System of Commodities? By Katharine McLean Growing up I loved all Disney Princesses, but Cinderella was my favorite by far. I envied her long blonde hair, admired her gorgeous gown, and wished for the day that my Prince Charming would show up on my doorstep with the glass slipper that would turn me into a princess. Now, at the age of nineteen, I cannot help but look back and wonder. . . have the Disney Princesses I’ve grown up with caused me harm? I argue that the stereotypical gender norms found in Disney Princess media and the capitalist nature of popular culture leads to a narrow-minded view of femininity. In Dustin Kidd’s book, Pop Culture Freaks: Identity, Mass Media and Society , he defines popular culture in a myriad of ways, but one that stuck out to me was the idea of popular culture as a system of commodities. Kidd (2014) states, “popular culture is art, transformed into commodity, working double time as advertisement” (p. 69). This d...

CONSUMER SURVEILLANCE IN THE 21st CENTURY

By Jonathan Bonilla Let's say you are surfing through the Internet or diving into random YouTube videos, and you see ads either playing a small promotional video for a service or a vivid photo of some random product. Now a days, the ads you see popping up on your laptop or social media page is not by luck or random chance; it is all by design. Marketers are changing up the game in which they showcase and sell to consumers in many digital spaces. They want to get smarter, faster and better in understanding what consumers like you and me desire. The world humans currently are moving into is heavily driven by data. Marketers are now taking an exploiting view, “instead of merely seeing data gathered about consumers as a guide to their product preferences and interests, such data is being used to refine mechanisms of shaping decisions, behaviors, and habits” (Nadler & McGuigan, 2018). There has been a major boom of consumer data by which marketers and advertisers need resources t...

BORN (TOO BLACK) THIS WAY

By Faith Blakey My nighttime routine consists of scrolling through my Facebook timeline. More recently, it has been filled with social issues that are both domestic and international; from fashion, politics, to personality tests. One of the most striking posts that I have come across recently was a clip from a documentary; “So when you bleach it makes you look more nicer, look more sexier, and look more cuter than you once was”. These words from a middle aged Jamaican women describes the sentiments that are sold with the global trend of skin bleaching. Her opinions towards skin bleaching, or “bleaching” as they call it in Jamaica, are common. This 2012 Vice documentary explores the idea that skin bleaching and colorism are practices that have become well known and respected in popular Jamaican culture. Although this documentary reveals the deep seated colorism that is prominent in Jamaica, it seems as if colorism has developed into a worldwide epidemi...

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