Zombies New and Old

I read the article "Raising the Dead: Unearthing the Nonliterary Origins of Zombie Cinema", which focuses mainly on the aspects of zombies and zombie films that have made such movies so successful. The main argument the author uses is that due to the inherently inhuman nature of zombies, they are more suited for visual purposes and media. Support for his idea comes mainly from his interpretation of Sigmund Freud's idea of the "concept of the uncanny", defined as "that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar". According to the author, this comes mainly from the idea that a zombie is something very evocative of things such as our own morality, and such movies even call to mind the Voodoo explanation for a zombie, which is a man turned to seem dead through drugs and mystical powders.

The three articles on texting were all very interesting. I had no idea that the US was so far behind its counterparts in terms of quantity of texting populations. The third article's study of relations between texting and emotional responses such as happiness, ease of use, and efficiency was interesting. Although all subjects in the study were college-age students, one can't help but think what will happen when this current generation ages and moves into the workforce, and new texters take their place. It seems ever more likely that texting and instant messaging will replace many office standards like memos and e-mails to quickly spread information to a group of people.

As for the scholarly articles, they are certainly a help and will continue be as research will grow to play a larger and larger part in the assignments and papers given out. Although the formatting for searches may take some time to get used to (I am currently unsure of how to make searches more explicit) my current set of tools are more than adequate. Especially important is the ability to define results as ONLY scholarly articles, rather than waiting and worrying to see if a teacher would deem a source credible enough.