Summing Things Up (Again)

In the beginning, the essay question that had interested me the most was question 2, considering the health of connections between celebrities and their fans. But after having written about them, I realised that I could not really connect with or relate to the fan mindset. Just having to watch a few PewDiePie videos for research made me cringe at the level of mindless content that this guy makes, and the fact that he has millions of fans reflects on the state of society as a whole. 

Another problem with trying to write about question 2 was that the two types of celebrities I was talking about are hard to find scholarly resources for. Most of what comes up when searching "YouTube" in both online and offline libraries is quite dated, talking about features and functions which no longer exist. There have also been very few studies on contemporary Korean pop culture, or at least ones written in english. 

On one hand, not being personally involved in fan groups, theoretically, should have made me be able to write about it in an objective manner. But the opposite was true. The more I delved into what was viral and why, the more I lost faith in humanity in general. Are we headed towards an Idiocracy future? Only time will tell. 

Question 1, regarding a local art exhibit, felt intimidating at first, but I decided to write about the piece by Tan Zi Hao after encouragement to join the art essay contest that is being held by the Ilham Gallery. However, in the end I have decided that while I will choose question 1 as my essay topic, I will be covering the "As We See It - History Through Visual Design" instead. As much as the Ilham contemporary art exhibition has its own merits, the array of artwork displayed is too vast for me to personally come to a conclusion about how I feel about it as a whole. 

For my essay,  I would like to examine what progress Malaysian media and graphic design has made culturally, especially regarding representation, and whether there are elements in graphic design are still being utilised despite the gap in technology. Furthermore, I want to talk about the propaganda methods mentioned in the exhibition, and their similarities or differences with modern Malaysian media. Finally, I would try to examine the grouping, selection, and placement of the artefacts in the exhibition and determine the curatorial goals of the curators, and whether I think they have been met.