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moving on

skindeep's picture

reading through everyones posts, it occured to me that everyone seems to be primarily concerned with what medium we should be using for the second half of the semster. while this is important, i think we shouldnt forget about what it is we're trying to explore

talking about blogs has brought up a lot of different questions in class, questions related to identity - who do you create an ientity for? when does this change? does it change?

the idea of building oneself id also an important one - do we have hard wiring or are we told that we do? how much does this affect our lives? how do we build ourselves and what do we use as a base?

if we can create another identity or get rid of our hard wiring on the internet then what is real for us? what dimension of living becomes real? and then what does that mean in context of the 'real world'?

and the question of language, and reading.. how the internet has refined both of those things and what that means in context of the world as it stands today.

these are concepts i would love to further explore. people have suggested good ways of doing so.

personally, im a fan of graphic novels, but journals (i think someone suggested that) sounds good to.

i was thinking we could expand out of the context of the internet but not leave it behind entirely, and move past books as well, maybe a movie wouldnt be a bad idea? or a vlog (video blog) because we havent looked at those yet.

Comments

rmeyers's picture

theme, not medium: use multiple mediums to continue discussion

This is a great point, and one I think should help our class in discussing the next half of our semester. Going off of that, perhaps we should look at theme instead of medium, and then pick multiple mediums to tie into that theme (themes: heroes, identity, mystery, the list goes on). This way we would not only be continuing our discussion of platforms (like the blog) but the basic format of the class as well: an overarching theme, repeated questions (most broadly: how does this medium change the theme? Does the theme change with the medium? How can this medium represent the theme differenlty? Etc.). I always feel the need for concrete examples, so... take mystery (although I am sure our class can get even more creative): read a mystery novel, read a graphic novel that falls under the 'mystery' catergory, watch an episode of some 'mystery' adaptation (Miss Marple, Inspector Clouseau), a movie, an online 'choose your own adventure' or serialized msytery story, short stories, board games. The list goes on. We get historical persepective and a continued discussion about what makes a genre vs. what makes a platform, as well as a deeper look into the "theme" of our choice. Now I am not sure if this is entirely what you were saying, but your comment made me think of this...

spleenfiend's picture

I agree with this 100%, since

I agree with this 100%, since looking at a specific medium or time period goes against everything we talked about in the beginning of class, and I think categorizing by theme and contrasting mediums would be more interesting.  I "voted" for graphic novels but really would rather look at other things in addition to graphic novels.  For the first half of the semester, we didn't JUST talk about blogs; we also talked about message boards, profile sites, databases, copyright issues, online academic essays, and the internet in general.  So why restrict ourselves?

Exploring the way identity is explored in different mediums would help us to understand how we form our own online identities, something we discussed before.

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