Arts & Culture

O’BRIEN | Cis People Telling Trans Stories: Questioning ‘Trans Visibility’ in the Media

By |

March 31 was Transgender Day of Visibility. Intuitively, the media industry is in a better place than just a few years ago when it comes to trans visibility; in 2015, The Danish Girl was nominated for multiple Oscars, and Transparent for several Emmys. Yet, critiques of these media representations by trans writers and activists reveal that the narrative of representation and progress is not so simple: though there is an increase in the depiction of trans stories, they are still overwhelmingly being told by cis people. In a media landscape where, according to a media-monitoring report by GLAAD, 53 percent of depictions of trans characters since 2002 have been negative, and a large chunk of the rest involve typecasting characters in victim or sex worker roles (who, it’s important to note also deserve to have their stories told), clearly, the depiction of trans people on TV and movies has not been fair, accurate, or nuanced. So when we see an increase in trans characters who are complex and humanized — even as main characters in a couple works last year — it’s easy to herald those as progress.

Columns

MALPASS | Antisocial Media

By |

Once upon a time, I could sit down, focus and hammer out an assignment in no time. Oh, to have those days back.  Now that I’m here at Cornell, doing work feels like pulling teeth more often than not. There are just too many distractions; the TV, easy access to food, my housemates constantly walking into my room unannounced and generally unwelcome. But above all, now that I work almost entirely on a computer, the Internet is just a click away. You know, given the amount of time I spend per day on the computer, you might be surprised to learn how much I hate social media sites.

Arts & Culture

O’BRIEN | The Internet’s Appetite for Confessional Writing

By |

By KATIE O’BRIEN

When browsing through my favorite online publications, I often end up reading stories told in the first person. The Internet is a hotbed for first person writing, be it on social media or through personal essays. This type of writing is often confessional in nature, discussing traumatic experiences or social taboos. I didn’t think much about the implications of this phenomenon, until a Slate article about confessional writing recently went viral, starting a discussion among publications and on social media about whether the nature of confessional writing on the Internet is a positive thing, and about the effect of making these confessions can have on the confessor. In the article, entitled “The First Per­son Industrial Complex,” Laura Bennett argues that in a digital media landscape where a claim to originality is hard to come by, “first person essays have become the easiest way for editors to stake out some small corner of a news story and assert and on-the-ground primacy … and [they] have also become the easiest way to jolt an increasingly jaded Internet to attention, as the bar for provocation has risen higher and higher.” So while confessional writing has become an important part of Internet culture, Bennett argues that their publication is often reckless and self-serving.

Uncategorized

Dems and Republicans Debate Implications of Current Media

By |

The Cornell Democrats and The College Republicans found common ground in Rockefeller Hall last night during a debate concerning media bias and its effect on civic education. The debate was sponsored by the newly founded Freedom and Free Societies. The sponsors of the debate defined civic education as education enabling citizens to make informed decisions concerning public policy and elected officials.
“Bias is inevitable,” said Prof. Barry Strauss, history, one of the judges of the debate. “You have to force yourself to look at different points of view regularly and accept [that] media bias is real.”
While both republicans and democrats agreed that bias exists within the media and results in the decline of civic education, they disagreed on why and how the bias is elicited.

Uncategorized

The Day Clay Aiken Came Out of the Closet

By |

…and the day the entire English-speaking world said, “Yea? And?”

The tale is as old as the concept of quasi-celebrities themselves. Boy (or girl) is gay, boy or girl gets famous, boy or girl keeps his or her homosexuality a secret and boy or girl comes out of the closet. And time after time, the world is unsurprised and unmoved and yawns at the announcement

[img_assist|nid=32138|title=Aiken holds a “secret.”|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=|height=0]Aiken reports that he decided to come out to the world because he simply cannot raise his newborn son with a lie, the way he has done for so many years. The now 29-year-old father decided last year that he would conceive a child with his friend Jayme Foster.

Uncategorized

How Gossip Girl Changed Marketing Forever (JK!)

By |

So Gossip Girl is back. And sure, it doesn’t have much of an effect on my life. (I only watched like six episodes, and it was only because Blake Lively is a fox, so it’s not even a big deal that I watched that much, right? Right? *Cough*) But yeah, it’s back, and people are excited about it.
Anyways, I bring this up because over the summer the folks behind the show mounted a massive advertising campaign to promote the beginning of the second season, and, as an intern in Manhattan around that time — who was subjected to no less than 6,000 ads a day during my routine treks through Times Square — I am well acquainted with this much vaunted marketing phenomenon.

Uncategorized

A Look Into China, A Glance Back Out

By |

“Adversities only make our country stronger,” the leadership of the All-China Students Federation told the Ivy League Student Delegation in a heartfelt recap of the devastation caused by the Wenchuan Earthquake – a natural disaster that has since left over 65,000 Chinese residents of the Sichuan Province dead, over 4.8 million homeless and over 23,000 missing.