About Me | 52dfs52drj

I once had a very strong link with visual images as I grew up. No matter how much academic pressure my parents and my teachers put on me and how much they wouldn't let me do my personal things, I always insisted on reading books, watching movies, and even learning photography in my spare time. Casually, I loved reading Chinese classical literature and was especially fascinated with stories in extremely influential Chinese classical novels such as Journey to the West and Water Margin and imagined that one day those visions depicted in the novels would become real. Whenever I was on a trip, I always took my camera with me as I learned to record the unique moments of my life and the greatness of nature and civilization, and my photography skill got improved every time. I was eager to watch television shows and movies to expand my outlook of part of the world that I hadn’t been able to reach and intensify my feelings toward others. I was always fascinated by the magical tricks of moving images that all the pieces of images are put together under advanced technologies to create so many incredible meanings.

I stick to my interest all the way to college, majoring in Broadcast and Cinematic Arts with a minor in History, and it was in my undergrad years that my general interest in the visual images crystallized into a passion in different aspects of media, especially in regard to film production, media technology, and media criticism. I not only produced many instructional videos, promotional videos, music videos, documentaries, and short films but also aimed to produce my own feature films that can exert prominent social influences and spark heated discussions of social issues.

Besides producing different kinds of videos, I started studying media with a critical lens. A seminar course titled “Understanding Communication Technology” provided me with the foundation to analyze the impact of American electronic media and assess future directions in media technologies. For this course, I wrote an extended essay on one of the prominent media technologies, the e-reader. The development of the e-reader and how it works, as one of the most powerful information and communication technologies (ICTs), continues to fascinate me. I keep delving into the enabling, limiting, motivating, and inhibiting factors of ICTs in the communication technology ecosystem and thinking about how they became the nervous system of contemporary society.

In addition, I acquired a few analytical and writing skills at one of the core courses “Critiquing Mass Media” with Dr. Patty Williamson. I truly developed my capacity for critical thought of media: an appraisal of mass communications systems as well as a rich understanding of their content, aesthetic properties, and societal effects. I realized that all centers of power today depend on media which generally use sensory manipulations and simulations, and media criticism is still in a developed state.

During my first year as a graduate media studies major at the New School, I decided to expand upon my interests in media criticism and media technologies and took a course entitled “Media Theory” with Dr. Eugene Thacker. The collection of works assigned in the course from Roland Barthes, Martin Heidegger, Katherine Hayles, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Foucault shaped my future academic trajectory in a way I never could have imagined. Their works gave me an open, rigorous, and critical understanding of media that can be deconstructed in three ways: media as technology, media as aesthetics, and media as politics.

Following that, the seminar courses I took at the New School, together, I realized the career in video production might not be enough for me to achieve the value of my life. This caused a shift in my focus, priorities, and ultimately, the trajectory of my educational path, from a determined pursuit of filmmaking to an academic path of media research.

We are living in a world of distractions. A world infiltrated by disharmonic information from websites, memes, and social networks; a world of smartphones, tablets, computers, and other electronic devices; an influx of cable channels, DVDs, and video streaming services. In other words, a world of continuous competing cacophonies. To continue focusing deeply on the media system that intrudes upon our daily lives subconsciously, I will follow my determined inquisitiveness to take on challenging coursework and build a solid academic foundation for my intended pursuit of research in media and communication.