Posting assignment #1 (due Sunday 9/18, at 11:59 P.M.): Read an object!

We've read a lot of cultural objects in class over the past two weeks -- including our classroom, Men in Black, sweaters, the words "walk" and "stop," Hummer ads....  To read these objects, we have used (and developed) a series of tools, including: 

• keywords (sign/signifier/signified, conventions, social construction, subject/object, position, subject-position, rhetoric, and many more);
• the text/author/audience triangle;
• Stuart Hall's Circuit of Culture (production <-> consumption <-> regulation <-> presentation/representation <-> identity); and 
• the six aspects of culture (culture is structured, rhetorical, historical, economic, psychological, political).  

Your assignment, in this first blog post, is to:

1. find a cultural object we haven't looked at in class -- anything is fair game (a space, a website, an ad, a word, a thing, a video, etc.), but you'll want to find something you think you can "read" effectively;
2. post it -- or a link to it, or an image of it, or a description of it -- to the blog; and
3. write and post, in the same post just below the object, a 200-300 word reading of the object, in which you describe the position that the object "argues" you into taking and explain how it does it.  Use at least THREE keywords from our work in your explanation.  You are also encouraged to use some of our other tools, such as the Circuit of Culture and the attached list of questions, to help structure your reading.

Finally -- and this will be the same for every posting assignment -- don't forget to come back sometime on Monday, read your colleagues' posts, and make a thoughtful comment on at least one of them.

Primary imperative for all blog posts:  don't bore your friends!  The more fun you have writing these posts, the more fun we'll all have reading them.  And a quick note on style:  blog posts are short, informal pieces of writing, meant for the other people in your Blog Community -- no need for introductions, conclusions, citations, any of that "formal" or "academic" silliness.  Just jump right in -- show us an interesting object, and tell us how it works.