I know that I am not the only one who has struggled to fully grasp the assignment of blogging. This assignment, however, has proven itself to be a very insightful exercise in not only considering but living in convergence culture. My initial troubles were with the format of the blogs. While I am not an avid blogger I have perused here and there and from what I have seen of blogs they do not typically meet university academic standards. Thus I was unsure if I should be writing what I understand to be a true blog or if I should be submitting what would essentially be a sort of reading report that has just been posted in a blog format. Still unsure as to the direction I should take I went back to Nicholas Mirzoeff's An Introduction to Visual Culture, hoping to find not only a topic for my blog but some suggestion as to how to compose it. This is what I found.
“visual culture is a tactic, not an academic discipline. … it hopes to reach beyond the traditional confines of the university to interact with peoples everyday lives” ( Mirzoeff, 4-5). Thank you very much Mr. Mirzoeff. With this one passage he was able to give me both an idea for my blog as well as a guideline for its execution.
First, I would like to address the idea of teaching, taking, or having a visual culture/convergence course in a university. As Mirzoeff points out, there are a multitude of different visual media, each of which is vast in itself, that are being studied independently. The problem is that today these different visual media are endlessly connected forming a pastiche of visual media, or a visual culture. In this visual culture it is hard to see the boundaries between each individual media because there is so much overlap. For example “webisodes”: short episodes of some television series' that are made to be shown on the internet and not on television. In this case would these be considered television programming or strictly internet content? If your subject matter is so ambiguous, how then can you hope to teach or come to comprehend it within the structures of a university? The answer is that you have to deviate from the structures of the university and come up with an innovative and compatible means of understanding this content.
This is what made me realize how appropriate a blog is for such a course. The struggle with content and form that I, and certainly some of you, faced is similar to webisodes. They are supposed to host the same characters/characteristics that can be expected from the show/a paper but they need to be reworked to fit within the new context. Thus I have attempted to rework my response to the Mirzoeff article to fit the personalized context of a blog.
