On day 3 we started off with a Guest Lecture at 10am in our CEA classroom. This lecture was done by Robby Flynn who is a professor at Dublin University. Flynn decided to educate us on media in Ireland how it changed through time. Although a lot was covered in this 2 hour lecture, I am just going to focus on a small portion that I found interesting. Something that was drastically different from the US was that in 1923 a Censorship Act was passed to restrict what media, mainly movies/tv the Irish population could consume. In the 1920s there was a debate whether films should be censored or not and it created a single individual. 8,000 movies were caught for review that included things such as sex, and movies that portrayed religion in a poor way. An example of a movie this directly affected was the movie Anatomy of a Murder. In this movie a word was censored throughout the whole movie which made the movie loose the whole point of the plot. They also banned things like British Comics for kids because they thought boy scout advertisements were linked to people joining the British army. Overall, Flynn was a really great speaker and he covered tons of really interesting information on Irish media, and this was a small insight into something we learned.
Our second event of today was the Print Museum. This measure was really cool because it was still a place that they made prints. Liam our tour guide was really enthusiastic about what he does which made the experience really engaging. We got to see the Original Heidelberg which was a machine that massed produced prints. The paper would suction to the machine and then the writing was being stamping onto the page in a continuous and efficient manner. Something I thought was really interesting was that we got to look at an old typewriter. This typewriter had multiple sets of the full alphabet. They had one set that was all the letters in lower case, one upper case, bold and italicized. Then, while you typed, holes were punched into a piece a paper that was later read and translated using a grid system to interpret which letter was used. After our tour we got to look at an exhibit they had up stairs which included graphic posters from the Abbey Theatre. As a creative person, these, I thought, were really fun to look at. Overall, I really enjoyed this museum and thought this was a great place to visit.
