What did I learn?

Batman Knightfall is comprised of several different stories that begin with an event and continues through the resolution of that event.  Because of this, the theories learned in this class were fairly easy to find an example pertaining to the particular theory from each week.  These theories taught me a lot about how to analyze a piece of popular culture and gave me the ability to learn more from popular culture rather than just get entertainment from them.  Of the many theories that I learned from this class, the one that seemed to have the biggest impact on my understanding of Batman Knightfall is the analysis of heroes and celebrities.

At first there seems to be little to no difference between heroes and celebrities.  Reading about the two subjects and looking up definitions I was able to find that they are similar, even sharing some synonyms in the dictionary, but rather different in understanding and definition. 

Of course when we think about how the theory of a hero applies to Batman it is obvious, the bad guy threatens the people of Gotham City, and Batman stops the bad guy becoming the hero for the people of the city.  We can also see how Batman’s true identity, Bruce Wayne, fits the definition of celebrity, making Batman/Bruce Wayne fit into both sides of these theories.

Through these analysis’ I found it interesting to see how the culture was shaped by popular culture artifacts such as Batman, not just this story but the character himself.  It seems to be hard to tell how much of the culture is shaped by the artifact, and how much of the artifact is shaped by the culture.  What it seems to me from these analysis’ is that each shape each other, and when an artifact influences the culture, the culture influences the next artifact, until after many iterations of different artifacts, the culture and artifacts have changed dramatically.