Since we’ll be reaching the end of our first posting cycle at the end of this week, here’s your next blog assignment:

1) find a video, audio file, blog post, image, article, or even a whole website that is somehow related to themes of this course or one or more of our assigned movies. (By themes I mean fear, anxiety, paranoia, most obviously, but also topics like zombies, nuclear war, conspiracy, terror, monsters, etc., etc.)

2) embed it or link to it somewhere in your post (make sure you credit the source) and

3) use it as a springboard for a substantive discussion of one or more of our assigned movies or ideas explored in our readings or in class discussion. You might talk about the connections between what you’ve found and our movies and themes or you might take an idea expressed in what you’ve found and explore it in the context of the movies we’re watching and the ideas that run through them. Feel free to run ideas past me if you’d like some help brainstorming. Please be sure to assign your post to the “blog assignment #2” category and to add 3 or 4 tags based on the themes your post covers, (e.g. “coldwar, zombies, fear”) You can enter tags just above where you select your categories.

You’re free to use anything you find in a Google or YouTube search but I encourage you to look beyond those and explore the Internet Archive, which is an amazing treasure trove of all sorts of media on an incredibly wide range of topics. You might play around on Flickr, Photobucket, Vimeo, delicious and the Creative Commons as well. You’re welcome to use any of the items I’ve posted to our class delicious account, but your choices will be rather limited. If you’re feeling more adventurous, you could try sites like WFMU’s Beware of the Blog or Ubuweb, a collection of avant-garde writing, video and audio.

If you have questions, please feel free to ask me in a comment or via email.