I always believe that Cultural Studies research should be a way of looking at the world that people can understand and use. In this age of information explosion, too much, ineffective information surrounds people and we are faced with many dilemmas:
The flood of information -- Whereas once people had few channels of information and relied only on TV or newspaper for information, today one app after another is a whole new world, and many of the content production cycles have become faster, with information being produced at a geometric rate.
The signal-to-noise ratio of information has increased -- the emergence of various content messaging platforms has lowered the threshold of content creation, regardless of your knowledge and identity, as long as you have a cell phone or computer you can create and be distributed by the platform to show others; however, not everyone can have high-quality output, ordinary and mediocre content always accounts for the majority The majority of content is ordinary and mediocre. Users are already faced with a huge amount of information, and because the quality of the output is difficult to be guaranteed, quality content is constantly diluted.
From September 27 to October 1, 1995, a conference was held in San Francisco, USA, gathering more than 500 political and economic elites from around the world, including Thatcher, George Bush Sr., and the chairmen of leading companies. The theme of the conference was: Coping with Globalization. At the meeting, the participants agreed that globalization would aggravate the gap between the rich and the poor, and would concentrate wealth in the hands of 20% of the world's people, while the other 80% were marginalized. So, how to resolve the conflict between the 80% and the 20% elite? How to dissipate the excess energy and discontent of this 80% of the population and divert their attention? Brzezinski, a senior American think tank at the time, believed that the only way was to give the 80% of the population a "pacifier". Let them settle into their tailor-made entertainment and slowly lose their enthusiasm, desire to fight and ability to think.
I think that Cultural Studies research should be designed to become an effective method and means of learning, so that people can look at the information they receive in a different way, critically, to see the problems in society, even internationally. In the process of research, knowledge is turned into value, and then the ability to discern and critique is acquired. The reality is that people are not always exposed to Cultural Studies research, so the projects and essays that resulted from researches become important. These projects will be another way for people to learn about cultural studies research. And research on specific topics can be more interesting and stimulate people's thinking. I think this is one of the reasons why I am doing Cultural Studies research.
My undergraduate degree is in Media Communication Studies, so I have learned a lot about media production, which has become my ability to move on. In recent years, the major trend of information development is the video content. Video is an intuitive way to access information, and the wave of short videos from YouTube, TikTok and many mainland Chinese apps has opened up a new mode of access to content. In this fast-food era, fewer and fewer people will and are willing to sink their teeth into reading to get information and knowledge. So, in terms of my long-term development, I hope I can communicate my projects to the audience in the form of videos. I want to make long videos and short videos. Short videos are mostly used to get people's attention and interest, so that they are willing to learn more on their own. The point is that the video should not only be an output of ideas, but also a video that raises questions and provokes people to think independently as a graduate of Cultural Studies. I hope that people will not be led by the powers that be to conform to what they believe to be true. Rather, we should follow the path we believe is the right one through our own thinking, and pursue what we believe to be the truth.
I wrote the First Version Portfolio Framing Essay during the first 500 class in MACS, and I put my work in this section because I think it shows how I think about Cultural Studies, and also why Cultural Studies matter. Here are some parts from the first version of the Portfolio Framing Essay, and I think these parts are interesting to show in my journey.
"Cultural Studies should be designed to help more people understand hegemony, dominant power, discourses, and other concepts, methods, and strategies that can make people's life experience in society better, but also make the world better. "
I think "The West and the Rest: Discourse and power" by Stuart Hall have explained my confusion on why people would confidently think what they know about other country is right. Hall explained that "the idea of 'the West', once produced, became productive in its turn. It has real effects: it enabled people to know or speak of certain things in certain ways. It produced knowledge. It became both the organizing factor in a system of global power relations and the organizing concept or term in a whole way of thinking and speaking" (pg.143).