As I was visiting my classmates' blogs this week, I was grateful for their honesty and willingness to share conflicted thoughts about media consumption and the role these media play in our respective lives.
Full disclosure: I don't know any programming languages (and kind of freaked out when I couldn't access the ning, because I assumed I had screwed up). I'm not on Facebook. I've dabbled with blogging, but have never allowed the blog to go public. I don't own a smartphone, though we've agreed to upgrade and get them soon. (Progress! Perhaps there's hope for me.)
Most of these choices are conscious ones, to maintain anonymity and privacy. The idea of cultivating an online persona to participate in these activities sounded a bit dishonest. Further, I find contradiction in Americans' reverence for privacy and the overwhelming popularity of media that allow users to broadcast the details of their lives online. I'm still not certain what I think about my own relationship to these media. As a classmate articulated in her diagram, technologies can both unite and isolate users. Is time spent building relationships between one's own online persona and those personas others create for themselves time worth spending? I'm still not sure.
Perhaps I'm starting this class from a different place than many of my classmates. As an undergraduate, I majored in advertising and interned with my university's office of communication as well as a couple of local Ad/PR firms. After graduation, I worked in PR and publishing for eight years. So, I appreciate media, as a consumer and also as a producer. And seeing these sides of it makes me appreciate some of the forces at work. I was interested to see that several classmates brought up issues related to advertising in their diagrams. It's a powerful force in media and I think its influence will be interesting to observe in the context of this class.
I feel as though at the end of the first week, I've collected a bunch of scattered thoughts. I hope I can better organize them and inform myself and my choices after this semester. I'm very interested in practice and the application of theory in the workplace. I'm also looking forward to using ning and the wiki site more. Similarly, I believe working with the definitions and theoretical language while trying to uphold the professional writing ethos of clear, concise prose will be a challenging and worthwhile exercise.
I am glad you bring your PR, advertising, and publishing background to class, Kim. Your knowledge and background can keep us "honest" and grounded as we approach class issues theoretically.
ReplyDeleteThe tensions over privacy are important ones to keep afloat in our upcoming discussions. I am wondering if you might want to take "privacy" on as your particular topic for class (you might want to add "public/private" or "privacy" and "publicity" to the wiki). There is so much written about the importance of privacy for the creation of citizens who can participate well -- and I think most of that writing, and its concerns, are unknown or overlooked in so much of our daily practice.
What do you think?