Adrian’s essay saddened and excited me at the same time. It saddened me in the same way that the knowledge that I am a part of the last generation to have avoided having their baby photos taken on iPhones makes me weep for my parents’ quilted cover glossy albums soon to be a thing of the past. Perhaps as a result of being way too obsessed with Puberty Blues, there is this weird part of me that pines for a past analogue era and a 70s aesthetic. The increasing irrelevance of print literacy makes me want to revisit the library of my old primary school and relearn the Dewey Decimal System for the sake of preserving a lost language. (Let me take a second to note that the greater my exhaustion, the freer the cliches flow. I apologise.)

Having expressed my love for the old skool, let me make it clear that I also find the ever changing, connective nature of the topic and greater industry extremely exciting. The concept of the ‘produser’ clearly distinguishes networked media from any form of media that has come before it, and it is fascinating to consider the topic almost as its own living and breathing organism, that is changing before our very eyes. It is exhilarating to consider ourselves a part of this constantly changing hub of communication and connectivity, and to realise that we have the power to consume and contribute simultaneously. The below quote summed this up perfectly for me.

Through such sharing the distinction between consuming and creating content dissolves so unlike books in network literacy we become peers in the system, and indeed to be ‘good’ at network literacies is to contribute as much as it is to consume.

The essay also put Elliot’s description of the course into a little more perspective. It is scary to realise that by the time I will be graduating, much of what I’ve learned is likely to have become irrelevant. As such, I understand that the focus of the course will centre on becoming an effective “peer within the system”, a good “networker” if you will, rather than focusing solely on technical and potentially non-permanent aspects of the subject.