Welcome to day 3, on the agenda today: a guest lecture and a trip to the National Print Museum! You may be thinking, that doesn’t sound like the most exhilarating day… however, it was oddly the best day of the trip thus far.
The day started a bit early with a guest lecture from Roddy Flynn of Dublin City University. He came to us to speak on the Irish media landscape throughout the years spanning from the first newspapers to the current day usage of social media. The lecture was quite fascinating as he dived into the media’s mitigation of the war of independence, the arguments for home rule and other Irish disputes and issues throughout history. I would say the lecture was 50% history and 50% culture, which allowed us all to gather a very in depth understanding of the Irish media from a properly educated, both scholarly and socially, Irish person. I found the censorship of media to be the most fascinating aspect of the lecture. Most people these days think of Ireland as a very progressive nation but it was quite interesting to hear about the censorship of family planning advertisements, the regulations on portrayals of religion as well as the intense rules on “evil literature”. This lecture also dove quite deep into the politics of Ireland and Professor Flynn was able to explain all the different political parties and how they tend to interact with each other. Overall, I enjoyed this lecture quite a bit and I felt it was a good lecture to start with as now it can frame all our other media experiences in the proper historical context.
After the lecture we had a brief break for lunch where I had a delicious sandwich and was joined by Maddie and Ryan. We wondering the streets a bit before we were due to report to the National Print Museum for our tour. You might be thinking, “A print museum can’t be fun, can it?” Spoiler alert: Favorite museum I have ever been to. This museum was the coolest and most unique landmark I have ever seen. Inside the building the museum had every type of printing press, letterpress, headline maker, etc. you could think of. What made it so great? Every single volunteer there was so excited to share their knowledge and show you how every aspect of a machine worked. Rather than just explaining how the press works, they showed us every step of making a newspaper/print and explained every action they were doing. I guess I had never really stopped and thought about how I though newspapers were printed, but now I know every single different way you can! I had a blast watching each machine be used and we even got a declaration printed for each one of us. The icing on the cake was the gallery of playbill/posters upstairs in a beautiful exhibition. And the sprinkles on the cake was the playroom where we all sat and did origami and used stamps to make our own arts and craft prints.
Later on me, Maddie, Ryan and Ayden all went out and enjoyed exploring the night, ending the night with a slice of pizza that was quite delicious for non-NYC slices!
