Letter Reflection to Myself

Dear Alvin,

It seems like it’s been forever since you started this class, but at the same time everything just seemed to flash by over the few months that you immersed yourself in the pursuit of understanding popular culture. You’ve been swayed many times by the words of Kalle Lasn in Culture Jam, you’ve analyzed advertisements, you’ve figured out how you see your win subculture of gamers, and you’ve seen the harm of television on society as an artifact of America’s popular culture. Though the time you spent was long and arduous, it’s an undeniable fact that you discovered and largely fixed many parts of yourself as a writer, particularly concerning your organization in the body and essay as a whole, in addition to adherence to thesis. You’ve also started to see much of the popular culture in a new light, especially concerning corporations and consumer culture, as well as the destructive powers of the media.

Honestly, the first reaction that you had when you read the first chapter of Culture Jam on the first day of class after Etudes opened was: “Is this guy serious?”. Lasn came off so strong in the introductory paragraph and at the time you didn’t know what he was about to tell you. Now that you went back and read it a second time after you finished the book, and he’s finished giving you all that you need to know about the evils of American consumer culture, you think that you’re starting to get a little swayed, even if you think his writing style is too aggressive and abrasive, and his logic is a little bit flawed in some situations.

One of the most shocking parts about the book was, ironically, the pictures of actual culture jamming and ads that were in the book, in particular the ad on the first few pages about “she’s got your eyes”, and on the cover, where the man has a barcode on the back of his neck. Even though you didn’t have much knowledge of what he would eventually be referring to, they played their part in shocking me by the level of bizzarity the images. The culture jamming movement was something that was nearly entirely new to me before you had read Culture Jam. It probably bothers you a bit how effective it was on you, and the fact is that if the information could get out more, it would definitely be able to sway more people. You think back to when one day you woke up and suddenly everyone was cracking jokes about how McDonalds made you ridiculously fat and it was disgusting. As a child you occasionally went there, and although you thought the cheeseburgers were a little unfilling and had too much ketchup in them, you still didn’t think twice. Now it’s nearly impossible for you to even think about picking up a burger from there. It’s amazing how a little bit of sway in popular culture can condition me as a child to grow up inherently hating something. In fact, you never go there anymore as a family, since your siblings and you would always complain. As a result, you’ve also changed our parents. This kind of movement also happened for Nike, and because of this, it makes you wonder how this can be taken to other companies. Also mentioned in Culture Jam, the banning of tobacco ads, actually came as a surprise to you since you grew up after that, thinking that it was common sense that that kind of advertising was illegal. This gets you thinking about whether it would be a good idea to try to use the internet to start Culture Jamming. With your computer and web programming skills and devotion, trying to launch a campaign like that would be a breeze. I think you still aren’t really making up your mind, aren’t you?

And other than how terrible consumer culture is, you also learned about what defines a culture, and you even discovered some things about your own. The funniest thing that you realized at the start of class was that the definition of the word culture itself is something that the entire field of anthropology is unable to agree on. Then as you started thinking about it, you realized that you didn’t even have the ability to pin down your own definition of the word. You tried your best and finally only came to the general consensus that culture had to be able to be passed down. Then you tried to apply your definition of this to a subculture you belonged to: gamers. Although the essay you wrote on this wasn’t the best, it was mainly because you rambled on for too long about something you love. The assignment told you to go do some field research, and oh boy did you do some field research. It’s great when the research is to actually go to LAN parties and play video games until the sun comes up, or go to school and play for a few lunch periods in the only club solely dedicated to playing video games. You realize a lot about yourself and how you belong in the subculture, and how you really began to see how it has helped shaped your identity.

Advertising was something else that you really had to look at. Despite being bombarded with a couple hundred a day without even registering a fraction of them, you didn’t know much about how advertising works. After you started to look at them critically, rather than a consumer, you began to unravel how corporations were really appealing to my subconcious. However, after you changed the subconcious into a concious appeal, you was able to control and analyze them much better. It made you realize why you wanted what you did, and suddenly when you went to the shopping mall to buy new clothes, you started to wonder if you really needed all this. Even though you legitimately needed new clothes since the season was changing and you had outgrown most of your warmer season wear, you started to feel a little guilty when you wanted to buy a somewhat expensive leather coat. You still ended up buying it, except it left a bad taste on your tongue. The advertisements pointing you to it were just glowing with the subconcious appeal of needing prominence. Maybe in the future what you’ve learned in this class will help you be a smarter consumer.

The usual response to reading process that you were used to was to just take what you learned and throw it all on the paper. You didn’t realize that that was just summarizing things and that it didn’t really help you much when it actually came to analyzing the actual text. Though surprisingly simple, you learned to summarize and then respond in the two paragraph format. You probably found that you would end up talking and analyzing for way longer than you would spend on summarizing, which you thought was wrong. Except it’s good for you, and you’ve broken a previously bad trend of yours. Your books also had quite a bit of annotation done in them by previous users, and it prompted you in some occasions to annotate as you read, something you’ve despised with all your heart since your sophomore year of highschool when you didn’t understand what you were doing. Now that you were free to annotate as you liked, you realized it made a lot more sense when you did it in your style rather than some predefined way your teacher made you do it. Overall you’ve definitely gotten better at reading.

Even though you came into this class with a very healthy love for writing, and considerable skill at it for a junior in highschool, you definitely saw growth through your essays. The first essay you wrote was very bland, and it resembled your basic five paragraph, boring highschool essay. There was no variety in it, and you wrote a solid essay, in the most to the book way possible. However, after receiving some feedback, you realized that this wasn’t highschool anymore, and you actually wouldn’t be penalized for not following some super strict outline. Thus you started to experiment with writing much longer and free flowing essays, which unfortunately didn’t end up working as well as you would like. Though you had more liberty to express yourself as a writer and my unique writing style, you ended up not having it as organized as you would like. This would eventually become the bane of your entire English 1A career and it was the single, if not only, that that you tried extremely hard to improve upon. The next essay you wrote in class also followed a more organized pattern of shorter, more concise paragraphs that were easy to chew on. Unfortunately this resulted in you not being able to set aside the best coherent, overarching thesis statement. It had some pacing and development issues and overall you probably feel like you could have done better if you just wrote less and focused more on your thesis. On the next one about advertising, you finally nailed it. Everything came into place and you wrote an amazing introductory paragraph to top it off. Hopefully you managed to pull it off again on the final.

Most of the things that you had to deal with on the paragraph level was quotes. It drove you insane because ever since elementary school, you’ve just never been able to remember where in the world you were supposed to end double quotes. Luckily the handbook helped you out, and also helped you figure out quite a bit about the MLA format that you previously were clueless about. You really started to get in with the program about adding textual reference into your essay to support your points, not just dump information to fill up a bunch of space and make your essay long. It really helped tie in everything, especially when you started to make your paragraphs shorter to improve organization.

The last thing that you really realize as you reflect back on the entire class was how much your writing style was able to be set free. You seriously hate not being able to add your own personal flair into essays, and an analysis of popular culture let you do just that. Being able to throw in personal experiences and still write a strong essay made it really easy for you to be passionate about your topic, and it definitely shows in your essays. The language you used wasn’t the most sophisticated that you’ve done, but the kind of flow, honesty, and relatability that you put into crafting every single sentence was a lot higher than usual. For once, you’d actually want to go back and read your essay, and realize how great it was and what you still have to improve on. Even though you’ve never really gotten a break from writing since you’re a highschool student, you can still safely say that this class has really made you start to enjoy writing again. Maybe you’ll finish up that novella that you started last year.

English 1A is over, and you’ve learned a lot more than you originally thought you would about popular culture and improved bounds as a writer. You’re taking the next quarter off, but you know that as soon as summer rolls around, English 1B is just around the corner.

Sincerely,

Alvin (Yourself)