Reflections part 2

SO, I accidentally combined my last two posts together, and instead of just deleting the post entirely, I thought I would stick with one of the main ideas of my English class and make it about the process, not the end product. Not to say that it isn't important to polish your work and have completed ideas, but really, showing how you got to that final product is just as significant as the product its self. When I first began this class, I was very skeptical about using the new media sources as a way to connect to literature. I am very attached to paper and pen, and I still feel like I respond better to the printed page, rather than online sources such as videobooks. However, I had never thought about how we interprete literature differently depending on which medium we choose to access. Over the course of time, I slowly began to think more and more about how media changes the way we think and respond to the things we learn about. While writing this blog this term, I have thought more in depth about my research than ever before. Usually when I begin writing a paper, I look up some online academic sources, I sit down and write my paper all at one time, and then I go back and edit. Thats all there is to it! For this class, we began by blogging about our books and the main topic of literature and the digital culture. Next, we started researching a little more using media tools, not classic academic sources. Then we began to connect to different levels of people that were related to our topics. This included bloggers, Professors, fans on fansites, our friends and families, and pretty much everyone that would listen to us. As we began to learn from our contacts, our blogs began to reflect the new interest we found in our topics and become a little more narrow in topic. Next, we found traditional academic sources, and blogged about those as well. Next we converted our ideas into the different medium of a book trailer! This forced us to condense our topics and think about them in a different way. Finally, we combined all our blogs, different sources and contacts, every communication we had ever had, and wrote a paper using every source available to us. The conclusion was a rough mash up of ideas and people. But even though my paper wasn't perfect, it was also more well thought out, more in depth and more relatable to a wider audience. It had the potential to become something that was important, rather than just another paper written on a topic no one cares about, that only the professor reads. 


One of my really good friends passed away this week, and I found out from facebook. It immediately hit me how much our social media has influenced the way we connect to other people and ideas. This tragic thing happened, and immediately people in Counties thousands and thousands of miles away knew about it. This connection to the world and people is something that changes the way we think and live. So it makes sense that the way we connect to fictional people and worlds should change as well. While I don't think that this lengthy process of writing and connecting to literature is applicable to every paper and class that I ever participate in, the things we learned in this english class are certainly something to consider every time we pick up a book or try to write a paper. In my head, I have always pictured the inside of my brain to look like a room with a desk. The desk has stacks and stacks of papers on it that represent everything I have ever learned. The things I learned first are on the bottom of the pile, and the more recent additions stay on top. Each thing I learn just adds to this pile of knowledge, building on and adding to it. I hope that the things that I have learned in this class will stay with me, to be built on and added to. While this way of learning and researching is time consuming and is not the easy way out, I have found that the things most worth learning are sometimes the most difficult and frustrating. While it will be challenging keeping up with all the new digital media, hopefully by participating in this way of thinking and learning, I will be able to make my work something more worthwhile.