Instr:                 Jamie Poster
Office:              CRT 518,     229-5441
e-mail:              poster@uwm.edu
Office hours:     by appointment.

Course Information:                 TR 11:30am-1:20pm,           BUS S165

Course Description

How do we experience movies and television?  Are watching TV and surfing the Internet similar acts?  Do we respond to each of these technologies in different ways?  The fields of film, television and Internet studies all offer distinct yet overlapping accounts of how people interact with media technologies.  For example, some film theories argue that spectators are sutured into the cinematic spectacle and/or constructed and gendered in the process of watching movies.  Television studies often imagines audiences who are either mindless couch potatoes or more engaged, resistant "textual poachers".  Internet studies grapples with the anonymous web surfer who, as she moves through hypertext, creates rather than simply reads the texts before her. The overall goal of this course is to gain a theoretically informed, yet material sense of how people interact with media technologies in the world of simulations.

Possible film screenings:
Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924), Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954), A Question of Silence (Marleen Gorris, 1982),
The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen, 1985), Set Me Free (Lea Pool, 2000), Nurse Betty (Neil LaBute, 2000), and more.

Possible television screenings:
Mystery Science Theater 3000, Moonlighting, Northern Exposure, MTV, The Simpsons, Joan Does Dallas, TV Nation, and more.

Internet investigations:
distributed online games, hypertext fiction, MUDs, MOOs, chat, listservs, ecommerce, search engines, and electronic art
installations.