15.03.2014  “MEDIA HUMANUS” club meeting at the NovSU Faculty of Philosophy

For more than seven years, the “MEDIA-HUMANUS” project has been realized in “Berestyanaya Gramota” laboratory of the NovSU Faculty of Philosophy. The club offers NovSU students discussion questions on mass culture with the use of illustrative video-materials – there are thousands of feature and documentary films in multimedia depositories of “Berestyanaya Gramota”. 

On March 14, the topic of “MEDIA-HUMANUS” club’s meeting was “Cartoons: an Innocent Hobby or an Active Source of Mass Culture”. 

Students were offered a programme of series “Moscow Week” for view and further discussion. Professor Andrey Nekita during his lecture about methods and techniques of the contemporary mass culture paid special attention to the way innocent-looking cartoons gradually form or better to say deform children’s minds. By the example of sociocultural and psychoanalytical research of the plot of such well-known cartoons as “Shrek”, “Beauty and the Beast”, “Aladdin”, “Tom and Jerry” and others, the students could consequently follow the way how an image of mother is devaluated in such cartoons. 

The viewing finished with a heated discussion during which every student demonstrated his or her opinion as well as proved it according to his or her life experience. The viewers summed up that the term “intellectual seduction”, which had been mentioned in film many times, was appropriate, because it shows the character of negative influence of the cartoons as elements of contemporary mass culture upon children minds.

English