MIT blogger Cami M. '23

Every Piece of Media I Consumed in My First Week of Class by Cami M. '23

that was relevant to my studies, i guess

This semester, I’m taking a wide array of classes, from music to media studies to English, and as a result, I’ve had to consume a lot of different media forms for my assignments! Here’s everything I’ve consumed this first week of classes.

CMS.S60 Rap Theory and Practice

I’m taking two music-ish classes, 21M.150 Intro to Music Theory and CMS.S60 Rap Theory and Practice. Although Lupe himself has said that CMS.S60 is not a music class, it is a media studies class, we do listen to music in and out of class and study it. This week, we focused on the importance of names and the power of them, having to write a rap about our chosen rap names.

For this, we were assigned to listen to Hi My Name Is by Eminem, What’s My Name by Snoop Dogg, and We Want Eazy by Eazy E.

I also listened to some extra raps for inspiration, particularly looking at female rappers, Filipino rappers, and female Filipino rappers.

I listened to a lot of 90s hip hop as my inspiration like A Tribe Called Quest, Nas, and Wu Tang Clan.

I really leaned into Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, listening to the album cover to cover a couple of times.

And I compiled also a playlist of music I wanted as inspiration for my rhythm and flow for the class:

It’s been really interesting trying to find out my style and I feel like I’m listening a lot more intentionally to the rappers I listen to. From my initial raps, I could tell that a lot of my flow was influenced so much by rappers I was already super acquainted with (J. Cole, Kendrick, Big Sean) and it was really surprising to see how much I internalized their styles and flows unintentionally, never having rapped before.

For the class, we also watched some videos on language and the brain.

These videos essentially emphasized the importance of the body as an instrument and means of rapping, and how all of this is a system working together to produce noises, flows, and rhythm.

We also read an excerpt from Donald S. Passman’s All You Need to Know About the Music Business: 10th Edition, which talked about the importance of choosing a name and the thought and consideration that goes into such a decision, such as checks for copyright claims, memorability, and iconic-ness.

CMS.614 Critical Internet Studies

Having already taken this class last year, I kind of have already seen the majority of this content for this class, but I still do the readings just so I’m in the know and can better understand and gauge the discussion.

For this class we read Jenny Odell’s “A Business With No End” which details her journey delving into the world of shell companies and online commerce, as well as Crawford and Joler’s “Anatomy of an AI System: The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data, and planetary resources.” (The name kind of says everything so I don’t really need to summarize it).

These were, in my opinion, really great articles to open with since I think it tackles all of the major themes of the class of exploitation, hidden labor, data privacy, nonhuman agents, and more. It also implores people to start thinking critically about where their information and products come from, how products get from A to Z, and really the muddiness of “the Internet” as an entity in general. This class has some really great readings that really have shed light and colored my perspective on essentially every interaction I have with the Internet as a whole.

21L.504 Race and Identity in American Literature

This class specifically focuses on comic books and the role of race and gender in superhero traditional comic books. For this week, we focused on Superman and his representation in the comics.

We looked at:

I felt that this class was a good next step after my writing comics class last semester and it’s been really interesting really deep diving into comics and no longer looking at their techniques from a writing perspective, but as a reader.

21M.150 Intro Music Theory

I’m taking an intro music theory class and to learn rhythms (eighth notes, sixteenth notes, etc.) our music professor made us clap along to Kendrick Lamar’s Swimming Pools, which was an incredibly hilarious and surreal moment. Bless your heart, Garo.

21H.S05 Encoding Culture

For my encoding culture class which looks at how media is represented digitally and how we can use various practices and tools to manipulate and analyze said encoded media, we read some introductory readings on the importance of humanities data and some general precautions to take when doing such work.

We looked at an excerpt from D’Ignazio and Klein’s Data Feminism, talking about the importance of the context of data, looking at what is missing from data, and essentially pushes against the aphorism “The numbers speak for themselves.” I’ve read some other things from Data Feminism in CMS.614 so the familiar names were comforting. I’ve always enjoyed what D’Ignazio and Klein have to say and I found this particular chapter so impactful, especially as someone that goes to such a prominent STEM school like MIT. Despite being one of the best schools in the country, a lot of our students fall victim to the idea that you can throw computer science or algorithms or really just STEM at any world problem to fix it and often fail to take into account the important of context, of the humans behind the problem, realizing that these are not merely numbers or data points but have a grounding in reality, in people, in places, in life.

We also looked at Posner’s “Humanities data: A necessary contradiction” which touches on similar themes as above, as well as Schöch’s “Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the humanities”.