First off, I got a lot out of the unlecture this week. Thumbs up. Maybe it’s because the first two questions were actually from me (Sorry, just had to get it out there. Call me vain.), and it felt like I was getting detailed and complex answers that directly addressed my thoughts about the course so far.

The most interesting part of the session though was when someone (I don’t know your name so I can’t link to your blog or anything, sorry!) brought up the fact that there will be plenty of kids who are capable of creating content that is potentially industry-level, yet they’re doing it without a university degree and are willing to do it for free, because it’s something that they love doing. If there are innumerable people like this in the world already, what is the point of us spending three years in a program learning how to make stuff when we’ve already been surpassed by someone who didn’t even need to do the damn degree?

I’ll admit, it’s something that’s been keeping me uncomfortable ever since I decided to pursue a career in media back at the end of Year 11. There are people out there making way better stuff than I can, and they didn’t graduate. Would I be wasting my time and money by doing this program at RMIT? Would I fail completely at finding work once I graduated?

The way that these questions were addressed by Adrian & Co. helped calm those fears a little. It’s not about ‘know-what’, it’s about ‘know-how’.

Still, I’d be lying if I said I was still hesitant about the future.

It’s being made increasingly clear as the weeks of this course pass by. The network is growing. Other forms of media are stagnating or receding (though my Broadcast Media teachers would say otherwise). I’m guessing that in the not so distant future we’ll be working to make material primarily for the internet. As exciting as this is for many, this worries me. I know how hard it is to be heard online. Sure, it’s great that it’s incredibly easy to put your voice on the web for everyone to hear. It’s incredibly easier for your voice to get drowned out by all the others.

Socially and morally I prefer this as being somewhat more democratic than a centralised media system like broadcasting, but at the same time, if I were to look at things solely in regards to my future career, it’s actually really daunting. Previously, if I managed to land a job at a TV production company or station, I’d be pretty satisfied. My foot would be in the door and I could work my way up in the industry. But with the rapidly shifting media landscape, that might not be the case soon.

This is the way I see it: If a person with twenty years of experience in film making tried to make a 7 second film, the odds are that his product would get less exposure than that of someone who haphazardly put together an amateur Vine clip. For all the creativity and experience that the professional brings to the table, if their work doesn’t hit the ‘sweet spot’ in social media, it is very possible that it will get lost in the abyss of ignored material on the internet. Sure, they might still get way more exposure than if they only tried to show the film at festivals or on TV, but relatively speaking, they might as well have just recorded their cat screaming and they might have gotten an even greater crowd.

That is a future that we could be stepping into right now. I hope I’m ready.

If not, I could always double back and just film enough random clips that one of them eventually becomes viral and I become an internet sensation. That could work.

Deal with it.
(Source: argorine.deviantart.com)

Something I found intriguing from this week’s lecture/unlecture was the discussion about the nature of our tertiary education, and the similarities and differences it brought up between enrolling in a uni course and engaging in a business transaction.

Adrian highlighted how education was far from simply consisting of us students as consumers, paying teaching staff to hand us information and knowledge as a service. It is not a transaction in which we get to be passive and let everything come to us. It requires action and our own end to drive our learning and experience, especially in a course such as networked media.

Cue talk about not knowing where we’re going and everything’s speculative. Oooooh.

Afterwards, Eliot somewhat sheepishly discussed how education was, basically, a transaction. We pay for something with money, and we expect to get something out of it.

Education is still largely based on a conveyor belt system built for the industrial revolution to churn out bodies able to contribute to society and the economy. We enter the system at prep and things are constantly added to us (information, experience, skills) until we pop out the other side -be that at the end of Year 10, Year 12, an apprenticeship, or a TAFE or uni course with the expectation that we will be functional in the environment that we find ourselves in. As students, we’re even separated into batches which dictate how far along we are on the conveyor belt, and these are defined (arbitrarily, some might say) by our age. Should age really define the levels to which a students’ abilities develop at any specific time? I don’t have any suggestions for any radical changes to the education system just yet, but it’s worth remembering that the stuff kids are going through today are still aimed at producing what the world needed a hundred years ago.

Source: Check the corner of the picture, fool.

The conveyor belt’s still a hell of a ride, though.