Initial+Proposal

While growing up in America, I have come to realize a key point about the American people – we are becoming more and more isolated in our own culture, and more and more ignorant to our own history, politics, and international history and politics. I am going to follow this idea by trying to answer the following question: Why are Americans growing more culturally, politically, and historically ignorant? I decided to follow this idea for my project and paper after having a discussion in my Global Studies class about America becoming a nation of irresponsible, politically unaware people. My project for this topic is going to involve going into the city, and randomly picking people around me to ask questions comparing American pop culture icons to political icons, national and international – all on camera. I hope to retrieve this footage on the weekend of October third, before I have started my research paper. My intent is to work on the editing of this footage during my study halls, and before and after school – I will be done editing the video project before I am finished my paper. I am currently anticipating trouble when asking random people questions, which is why I am going to focus mainly on student populated areas, such as University City, as students are more likely to participate in random filming and quizzing. I can anticipate this project involving a large amount of time spent in Mr. Meder’s room, and wrapping myself up in his video editing software. As for the paper, hopefully research will not be hard to come by and I will be able to obtain enough to answer my questions and assess the topic.