Keene State College Citizenship Symposium

I atteneded two speeches for The Keene State College Citizenship Symposium. The first speech i went to was supposed to be held by Bob Steele, “The Media Mosh Pit: Journalists, Bloggers, and Citizens in the Dialogue vs. Diatribe Dance" but instead it was a man talking about voting and the different ways to count votes. I came in late to the speech due to a proir class so i never caught his name. I thought that the the speech was very usefull and helped me learn somthing that i knew absolutley nothing about. He talked about how there are different ways that they count up the ballets in voting( somthing i had never known about). The most interesting phrase that he stated to me was that " different methods produce different results". I thought that was interesting because how do you know what method to use, or the question really is what is the right method to be used? I think the method that seemed to make the most sence to me was the Plurality- With-Elimination method. This method basically means majority wins. Whoever has the most first place votes is the winner and i think that is how its supposed to be. I thought overall the speech was informative and interesting but some what boring in the way it was persented. The second speech i went to on Thursday was “Animation as Political and Social Constructions.” KSC professors Jiwon Ahn, Sander Lee, Mark Timney. I thought this was an extremley interesting and enjoyable presentation. The first speaker to talk was Jiwon Ahn and she talked about Tokyo Pop. She showed pictures of chinese animation and drawings. When describing these pictures she stated things like "Men act and women appear" and she described a certain picture by saying "Thus she turns herself into an object often naked, also either beaten, mutalated..bleeding ect". I thought that actually looking and taking apart these pictures was really interesting.The second speaker was a man named Sander Lee who talked mainly about cartoons. He focused on two cartoons Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck. He talked about the message that these cartoons were actually portraying about events like WW2 and Hitler. I thought that the certain things he pointed out in these cartoons were so eye catching. Watching these cartoons as a kid i would have never looked past the kinds of way things cartoons were portrayed. The third speaker and my favorite Mark Timney talked about the show South Park. He played a an actual show from South Park about the War in Iraq. The show was funny but yet i didnt really know how to act because i didnt know if it was wrong or not to laugh. South Park is a satire it poked at issues like "going to the war and then say we never wanted to". The question was does South Park make us even more cynical of our government? To be completely truthful i had no idea on how to answer this. I thougth over all this Session of speechs was by far my favorite out of the two.