Today in class we went over what is required from us in terms of our blogs and the readings.

Essentially our blogs can include anything we want, with the consideration of copyright breaching and publication office.

We can blog abut anything we notice and that is worth sharing – social media.

5 posts a week = turning it into a habit, noticing things in the world around us and documenting it.

For the readings, the whole class agreed that we struggled most with how to interpret the content as it can be difficult, long and time consuming.

The main strategy raised in order to help this struggle with readings is to never stop. Never just stop reading because it’s too hard or too long. Keep reading, take breaks, re-read, take notes, mark the bits where you’re stuck.

I think I should blog to:

• Document what I notice that day
• Ensure I keep a recollection of notes to refer back to later on and broaden my learning
• Keep my mind curious, writing down questions to readings or parts of class I didn’t quite understand
• Open my mind up to different things around me
• To get into the habit of noticing the things around me in every day life. An important skill to have going into the media industry. Staying up to date with current events.

STORY: an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment.

PLOT: the main events of a play, novel, film, or similar work, devised and presented by the writer as an interrelated sequence.

NARRATIVE: a spoken or written account of connected events; a story.

Teleology is the idea of final causes. Things happen for an external reason and theres an end point in mind. It’s heading towards a ‘destination’, know where it’s going.

Stories have to be teleological. There is no such thing as an accident in a story. Everything crafted within a story is there for a purpose; to get to the end.

The problem with teleology is it’s not the way of the world. Nothing in your life has this shape, only written or visual story material.

Why do stories end? They have a last page or a last frame; they have to! Material in a linear form must end.

Today we were to do another diagram of the relation between us and a family member, mine was my younger brother. This time, we really had to branch out as far as possible, basically showing how everything we do relies on something else. There are many steps within these processes we take in everyday life, specifically within the relation between us and our chosen family member.

It came to the conclusion that we are not in complete control over our actions, when in fact they are completely reciprocal. Meaning that it’s a two way deal.

For example, Lucas said that it was his decision to go and see the film ‘Moonlight’ with his friends, which he was correct in saying, however not. It wasn’t his choice entirely. He wasn’t in control of the distribution, production or anything to do with the film itself, his friends decisions in seeing the film, etc.

In class Adrian showed us the Kuleshov Effect. The shot of the face itself in the video does not change, however we interpret different meanings based on the previous shot.

The reason for Adrian to show us this is, in my opinion, clearly to do with our upcoming project due on Thursday. It’s the ideas of creating meaning and making connections through editing. In our project we aren’t to visually show the object we’re describing in our videos, instead anything else. This could be demonstrating how us as a class are going to make connections between the visual and audio that we hear and see in each other’s projects and through these connections how we create the meanings.

The meaning through editing essentially happens within the relation between things.

In class the term ‘technological determinism was raised and I had never heard of it before. So I googled the definition and this is what came up.

“technological determinism is a reductionist theory that presumes that a society’s technology drives the development of its social structure and cultural values.

The Rushkoff reading “When Everything Happens Now” was actually really interesting and a good read. It essentially discussed the ideas of what lies ahead in the future and the new approaches, theories and technologies. One section that stood out to me was “When people stop looking into the future, they start looking at the present”. This is such a true statement and really demonstrates these aspects of noticing in every day life.

What would happen if we were constantly caught up in the future?

How important is it to see the world or to “experience” it as a collection of stories as Rushkoff suggests?

Are we truly able to remodel the future? How much control do we as humans actually have over this?

It was interesting to realise that the piint of doing the activity was to establish the overall aim for the course. Treating each line as distinct and individual is an important rule to follow as it teaches us not to generalise. It’s important to describe and discuss specifics rather than to generalise, and through this activity we were able to find the specific relations between things.

 

 

Today made me think a lot about habits and the habits we as humans have in every day life.

Why do we have habits?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of habits? Well there are good and bad habits. Having good habits gives us positive structure. It gives us a way of life…

How can we stop bad habits? You can stop a bad habit such as biting your nails by using specific toxic polish that burns your mouth every time you go to take a nibble… But what about the bigger habits such as behavioural habits? The ones that can affect social and mental development.

Anyway.

Then I thought about noticing habits and more specifically, my own habits. I don’t really have any habits I can think of. Does this mean my habits aren’t bad and don’t need attention or change? Or is it because I just haven’t noticed any?

Well now I’m going to start noticing them. And I’m excited to see what I find.