The following is a discussion topic that I am leading with @paisian in our Media Literacy course at The New School.
As this week’s topic is Digital Participatory Culture we (Neal and Joel) thought it only suitable to collaborate entirely on the discussion piece to kick this off. We used Google Wave to formulate our ideas and get a basic outline of what’s to come and then moved it into a shared Google Document to put the last formatting touches on it.
The discussion this week will break down what we took away as the most significant aspects of the new digital participatory culture and attempt to stratify all of these new ideas with your experiences, thoughts, ideas and research.
Many of us in this course have grown up with computers and the Internet present for most of our lives. Those of us who were recently undergrads most likely connected pretty distinctly with both the Jenkins and Watkins readings.
Jenkins defines this new participatory culture as,
“A culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices.”
(pp. 3)
With so much of our day-to-day lives wrapped up in the digital world, at some point you have to jump in and start contributing to the discussion. As Jörg has mentioned, Jenkins has shown us that in order to stay relevant and alive in the digital culture, we need to participate in it. Today, that takes many forms.
¶ Read More…
Online search giant Google recently made its foray into the formal social media sphere with its Google Buzz service. Tied into the popular Gmail web-based email client, Buzz was rolled out to Google’s approximately 146 million most active users, the company saying that a social network has always been beneath the surface of its email technology (WSJ.com). But even with the current social-media craze, many users were unhappy with what seemed to be an intrusion on their everyday social routines. We’ll look at some of these users’ comments and I’ll espouse what I see to be some of the possibilities that we might not be hearing over the Buzz. ¶ Read More…
These are taken away from Carol Wilder’s Understanding Media Studies course at The New School.
- What do I want to know?
- Why does it matter? To whom?
- What do we already know about the subject?
- What is a workable research question?
- How can I find the answer?
- How can I analyze the results?
- What conclusions can I draw?
- What can I contribute to future studies?
- How can I communicate the result to others?
This post is set up to be a reminder to me as I continue my masters degree. I need to be thinking about and answering these questions as I determine the research I want to do in this field.
I registered for classes last night. And it feeeeeeels good.
I’m taking two required seminar courses and a design course that I am excited about. Color theory, typography, layout… it’s going to be great.
Can’t wait to start! Apparently orientation videos will be online on Monday and the processes to add me to Blackboard will also run. And allegedly I have no textbooks? That can’t be right.
I’ll have to check that out again later…
