Blog Post 4: Jan 31st

The digital media certainly shapes my understanding of place and space. My experience with the Chinese grocery store seems to answer this question:

Every time I step into a Chinese grocery store, I see a tightly knit community that has guarded itself from the rest of Kansas. Visiting my relatives in St. Louis, I see their Chinatown, and their reluctance to move out of this Chinese community. It isn’t necessarily the “place” in Kansas or St. Louis, but it is the “place” that represents home for my relatives. Beyond the Chinese grocery products, and the Chinese customers what clearly make these Chinese communities is the media. Once I stepped foot in those Chinese grocery stores, it was the Chinese newspapers, Chinese advertisements, the Chinese news and television programs that transformed a grocery store that sold Asian products into a store that found a place in China. The essay by Eric Liu certainly explains this “Chinatown” idea more clearly.

There are other things that shape my understanding of place and space. The sense of place is established by cultures, communities, and by the people. As the reading reveals, “For most people, coming to terms with place is ultimately a personal matter.”  So how does the media shape place through our personal matter? I have thought about this constantly. Since those sand boxes and metal lunch box years, I realized that bringing fried rice to school wasn’t the ideal PB &J.  Even then, I sometimes questioned my “place.” Until middle school, I convinced everyone, including myself, that I was from China because Chinese culture was (and still is) more prevalent than my “American culture”. So, I guess place can also be defined through the cultural aspects and way of life that can clearly define your place and home within a community.  Well, for me, since chopsticks are more prevalent than forks, egg rolls more so than hamburgers, these simple things can even change the meaning of “place”.

New Media Identity Project Reviews:

Brenna Davidson: I certainly enjoyed Brenna’s presentation. To see Brenna's mother heavily involved in media production revealed how this started the roots to Brenna’s own media identity. What I loved about her presentation was the detail and specific media that held her interest during each stage of her life. The presentation showed me how media can mold someone like Brenna into a unique and lovely individual.

Casen Sperry: I loved Casen’s project because he showed another way of presenting how media has molded his identity. By showing home videos of his movie making adventures (from a small age), he revealed a early interest that has developed him into an inspiring filmmaker today.