“Meet Me at Bikini Bottom: SpongeBob SquarePants and the PostModern Media Environment”

Abstract: For those of us what have long been engaged in the field of film education, raised on the feature film canon of Hitchcock, Ford, Welles, Kurosawa, Bergman and Godard, today’s media landscape can look as foreign as the moons of Jupiter and seem about as easily accessible. How do we, who have spent decades studying the feature film, narrative as well as experimental cinema and documentary, reach a student body for whom Tik Tok and youTube videos occupy far more of their viewing energy than the classic works on which our discipline was founded? While despair may be the most immediate response, the fact is in order to teach and perhaps even to study the moving image in a contemporary context we must meet our students where they figuratively reside, which means paying close attention to the material that engages them most powerfully. By incorporating their preferences into our pedagogy, without entirely giving up the century old tradition of the cinema, we can optimize the educational experience by embracing a perspective that takes current media conditions into full account.