Yukun's Questions

1 Question about Baudrillard's simulacrum.

Baudrillard's impressions about Disneyland and Watergate are really persuasive for me. However, there is a question emerging in my mind. Why do media create those fake images for us? I couldn’t find the answer in Baudrillard's article. Should we be back to the starting point of critical theory to think about the divide between classes? I don’t know if I could say that in order to protect their interests, the upper classes to implant their ideologies to low classes.

Questions about postmodern virtualities

2 in page 537 “ The dominant use of English on the Internet suggests the extension of American power as does the fact that e-mail addresses in the US alone do not require a country code”. From the perspective of political economy, I agreed with this point of view. But from the perspective of culture studies, I doubt this point. In material level, no one will doubt America’s power, no matter in economy and politics. Language is related to identity. In my opinion, it is too exaggerate US’ power and believe English contents on Internet dominant the virtual world. Though we can’t deny US’s powerful influence on global culture, people have created unique cultural contents on Internet in other regions using different languages.

3 question about nation-state.
Mark poster’s attitude toward nation-state is just one-way thinking. Though I agree with the notion that information communication technologies (ICTs) bring impacts on sovereignty, nation-states are still the most important actors in global society. World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) is a good example to prove this notion. Without the participation of US, the biggest stockholder on Internet, WSIS is meaningless. Like what Durham and Kellner claimed in page 450, “Many postmodern theorists, such as Baudrillard and Poster, arguably the rupture with the past, falling to note the continuities,…”.

4 Question about “Quentin Tarantino’s Stat Wars”
I am interested in that the author pointed out the conflicts between media convergence and participatory culture. I am just wondering why the media conglomerates oppress this culture. More flourish this culture, more profits the media conglomerates can gain. In addition, there is an Internet subculture “KUSO” in East Asia. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuso
This subculture is very popular in Japan, Taiwan and China.
KUSO example for star wars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmcenZ3R8dc

5 Question about A welcome for BlogsI am interested in the debates on the democracy of journalism. The author points out the main question of E-journalism. Many literatures have proved that the contents of personal blog are still based on the mainstream media. In my opinion, personal blogs could be supplement for media contents. It is impossible for those blogs to replace all mainstream media.