Monthly Archives: May 2019

Structural Analyses

Look Back When You’re Walking 👀 Structural Analysis

Part I. The Plot

Sequence 1       A young, Black woman wakes up to start her day. Through narration, we learn that her name is Jay and she is college student who is very active on her campus.

Sequence 2       Immediately after waking up, Jay turns off her alarm and checks her phone. She scrolls through Tinder and Groupme, updating herself on what has happened overnight.

Sequence 3       After getting out of bed, Jay continues checking her social media while getting ready for her day. Leaving her room and heading to class, she listens to “Act Up” by the City Girls.

Sequence 4       After class, Jay walks to Paresky to do work. While sitting in Lee’s, her friend approaches her and shows her a meme that she has already seen. They laugh.

Sequence 5       Next, it is time for Jay to do what she does every day–surf the web.

Sequence 6       At a meeting for her group project, Jay and her friends discuss how digital technologies reinscribe and/or eliminate distinctions of race. Jay mentions how there could be a special curator deciding what we see, which we then use to learn about different races and cultures.

Sequence 7      After her meeting, Jay returns to her dorm room and gets ready for bed. As she is in bed, she scrolls through social media on her laptop one last time.

Sequence 8       While she is sleeping, the camera that has been watching her all along zooms in on her face.

Sequence 9        Next, an unknown person watches Jay’s day unfold on screen.                                                                                                             (256 words)

 

Part II. Scene Selection & Analysis (7:10)

An anonymous person watches Jay as she walks to the Paresky Center.

In this frame, we see an unknown figure watching Jay as she walks from class to Paresky. The camera, while filming from behind, is shooting the scene from eye-level which allows for audience members to see exactly what the mystery man (or woman) is seeing from the same perspective. Due to the camera’s positioning, we can only see that there is a person, but we cannot tell who they are.

Right before this scene, Jay speaks to her friends as they work on a group project. They speak about whether or not digital technologies affect our understandings of race to which Jay says that they do and that there could possibly be someone watching what we do to determine what it is that we see on social media. The current scene displayed above addresses just that. The  person watching Jay throughout her day could be perceived as the curator of Jay’s social media content. As he or she is watches Jay navigate the spaces of her school, they use her interactions with those around her, as well as past data from her social media activity, to craft what Jay will see the next time she is on her phone. What Jay then sees will determine how she understands the world around her, but especially race.

On the other hand, with the camera’s orientation as is, the identity of the anonymous viewer is open to interpretation and could be assumed to be a random person who is watching Jay and actively surveilling her. Considering cameras everywhere and almost all social media platforms allow us to record, the anonymous viewer could have received this footage from anywhere. While, the information collected from watching Jay will not be used to construct her timeline, it encourages the viewer of our multimedia narrative to be wary of what they do and post because there is always someone watching. While this is unsettling, it reveals the dangers of today’s digital technologies.                                      (325 words)

Multimedia Narratives

Final MMN – Look Back When You’re Walking 👀

Text me when you get home safe.
Cross the street if you feel suspicious.
Put your phone down!

Our daily routine is deeply connected to our access to technology. From our Daily Mix on Spotify to our cell phone alarm, it is almost impossible to function without technology. Technology holds us accountable. We can’t wake up without setting an alarm, we can’t mindlessly scroll through Instagram to pass time, and it feels uncomfortable to walk outside without music playing. But is that all it does?

Jaysirrel is a young Black woman who finds herself dependent on various forms of digital media. As we follow Jaysirrel, we start to discover that her daily routine is not at all conventional. All aspects of her digital presence are precisely curated for the black female user. It is as if her computer has mapped out her entire day for her.

They are watching everyone, and it is not by accident.

 

(Please find a structural analysis for this video under the “Structural Analyses ” tab on this page)

2.0 Minis

Race in Grand Theft Auto V

When playing Grand Theft V, what I became most aware of was that Franklin, one of the main characters, is forced back into a life of crime by those that are supposed to encourage him to get out. In the intro scenes, he is harassed and searched by three officers—one black, one, latino, and one white—but it is the black officer that steals his money, questions his innocence, and antagonizes him the most, even going as far as to accuse him of a crime and drop him off in a rival neighborhood. Also taking place in this scene, the white officer calls Franklin’s taxi driver a “greaseball bastard.” Thus, from these opening scenes, it is apparent that the game is relying on tropes and stereotypes to characterize its characters. Los Santos, while a fictional location, seems to be based on Los Angeles or any other neighborhood in which people of color live in poverty. Criminal activity is often correlated with poverty, so it is no surprised that the game takes place in some of the more poor areas of the city. For various reasons, these areas are populated by people of color and this is definitely reflected in the game. In addition to this Franklin, “the lone player-controlled Black character,” lives a life in which he has never met his father and has lost his mother because of a drug overdose, “[bringing] to life the dominant narrative of Contemporary Black families” (Leornard 130).

The black men that Franklin interacts with in his neighborhood are also gang members. They all appear to be straight and, with the exception of one woman, male. This one woman, dressed in a short skirt and crop top, walks away from an ensuing argument to see her partner. Her clothing, language, and way she is being represented seems to be built off of stereotypes regarding black women. Not only this, but so does the entire game. Franklin is sent on missions with Ryder, another member of his gang, and is first sent to get a haircut. He is then asked to distract the employee of a pizza restaurant, so that Ryder can rob him. The employee in this interaction is a white man who immediately responds to the robbery by drawing his own weapon. This seems to again, reinforce stereotypes of black criminality and white victimhood, “[creating] a world of “demons” and “angels” in which black and brown people are the demons and white people (and police officers) are the angels. This is inherently damaging given the game’s target audience.

Based on the many tropes that are used throughout the game, I am almost certain that the game is played by mostly middle-class white Americans. Best said by David J. Leonard, the game is a place “where White kids can fulfill their insatiable desires to become Black, [and] to experience the danger of “ghetto life” (Leonard 130). It allows them to play the role of a black person without ever taking on some of the responsibilities and consequences. (502 words)

Leonard, David J. “Grand Theft Auto V : Post-Racial Fantasies and Ferguson Realities” in From The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class, and Culture Online. Edited by Safiya Umoka Noble and Brendesha M. Tynes. New York, Peter Lang, 2016.