Author: Mingyue Deng

There are many types of single stories in our daily lives. We hear from people all the time their own perspective on certain issues. And those are all categorized as a single story. People usually cal, these kinds of stories stereotypical from someone’s perspective. In the TED talk, she talked a lot about how white people view Africans singularly in point of view rather than from both white and African perspective.

However, I think that she is also talking from her perspective, which is a single story, of what she understood to be from white’s perspective and African perspective. She recognizes that there are different kinds of white perspectives on Africans and the African regions, but like what she said, she doesn’t and couldn’t represent all African regions. There are certain places maybe where people take a very different perspective because for every individual there is a different single story.

After analyzing her definition of a single story, there should be a discussion of how could we avoid the single story. From my point of view, which is a single story, there are no ways to avoid single stories. There is only a way to gather all kinds of single stories and combine them together like what she did in the TED talk, to tell the entire story.

Regarding The Rights of the Molotov Man, I could not tell which side is correct since I think both sides have their own reasonings. But for me, I actually think that the Molotov Man does not belong to Joy or Sarah, it belongs to the Molotov Man himself. Only he could understand the moment either within the context or outside of the background story. So, I don’t think the reasoning provided by both Joy and Sarah could define the copyright of the photo.

I know that there are many reproductions of images, and I think that when an image is made public, it could be reproduced by others to create new meanings. However, I still believe in copyright fees to the author, and it should not be dated by a time of seventy years or fourteen years after production. It should be paid either to the author or a fund by the author. I don’t believe in paying the heirs of the authors because they should be benefited by something their predecessors created. I think that the photo is Sarah’s but there are not many claims by her to the history that she is referring, I think that part should belong to the people who actually experienced the entirety of the revolution or part of the revolution not as a reporter or a photographer but as a local.

In Jonathan Lethem’s piece The Ecstasy of Influence, he talked about how ideas could be borrowed by others unconsciously and then realize how these ideas are not original. He gave examples of many artists and writers who are gaining from these influences and those who are becoming very controversial because of this borrowing of ideas.

I agree with Jonathan Lethem that it is very hard to distinguish between the original ideas and plagiarism anymore because people have so many interests in common, and there are only so many resources in the world people could use to consume information. And in a digital world, people would rarely actually go look for the sources when some ideas come, or if the idea was being produced before in some form of art. I once read that the majority of the music people produce today were produced before by classical pianists before. I think that it is very hard to produce anything original anymore since even words were used before by the creator of words. Thus, there are inevitable similarities between contemporary works and original works.

Nowadays, plagiarism is written in school policies and company policies. However, it is becoming very hard to figure out if one is using someone else’s quotes as a reference or does this author think that it is original.

This audio episode of a thriller completely changed my perspective on podcasts. There are several points when the background noise and the conversations and the dialogues were creating an image in my head like I was actually watching it on TV. Although the faces of the people are blurred, I was imagining every person’s face with the voice I was hearing. Especially when the sounds were suddenly turning into the complete silences after each session, I felt like I was watching a change of scenes in an episode on TV. Also, the way the main character talked when she was interviewing people and when she was questioned by the man from the Department of Defense was completely different in tones. It was like she actually does not remember anything from the interviews but she remembers that she worked there before. And the audio ended there with her not remembering anything from her past experiences in the Homecoming Initiative. She could not even explain why she quitted that job. This kind of open end makes me want to hear more and find out what happened. And the background noises of the fish tank and the street noises and airport noises completely engaged me into the scenes and I could imagine where they were or what’s the surrounding like during the conversation. The phone recording was creating a dialogue which gave a lot of background information to listeners but it leaves doubts too leaving blank spaces for the dialogue between the Defense Department man and Kate’s conversation to fill out.

Project: Comic Project

Link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~md3606/commlab/week5/comicproject/

Documented By: Mingyue Deng, Shirley Liu

Blog Response: Mingyue Deng

For this project, we came up with the idea of the girl having a daydream and going on a trip in the daydream after seeing her parents fighting. However, we could not find a way to distinguish reality and dream so we decided to change our storyline. We ended up with the girl looking for a cafe and walks into a magic door, and goes on a trip to many places and opens several magic doors to go to the next place. She ends up waking up in her bedroom.

When we are doing this project, Shirley was responsible for the drawings as we discussed how we are going to do it. I did most of the coding.

There were several issues which were not working well for me. We tried to do a website with scrolls in JavaScript, but I could not be able to do that with every function I tried, so I gave up and ended with doing a slideshow.

There are still several issues with the slideshow, I could not be able to make the last image stay as it should be linked to the next page. And the slideshow does not work well with the first image showing up first when I open the page. I could not fix it, so I left it like that.