Musing #1

I have no clue what to do for the first Media 1 assignment we’ve been given. It’s due this coming Thursday and although the whole thing has been explained to be several times (both in person and via email) I still haven’t got a good grasp on the concept. The whole idea is to make a ‘creative self portrait’ (no selfies – boohoo). We have to follow a number of pre-requisites including audio, text, visual and so on. I’m going to brainstorm for the next half hour possible ideas that really incapsulates me.

Wish me luck!

Are you paying attention?

Do I have Deep Attention or Hyper Attention? 

In my first Lectorial ever I learnt these two terms. My first impression was that I totally misread Hyper Attention as hypertension, but aside from that, I’d never heard about the different kinds of focus. Deep attention refers to the ability to keep un-compromised attention onto one thing at a time – like reading a book without distractions and so forth. Hyper attention is pretty much the opposite and occurs when one focuses on several things at one given time. Considering I’m sitting here listening to music on 8tracks, checking Twitter and talking to two friends at once on Facebook while writing this… I guess you can figure out which attention I have.

But it’s an interesting concept, because I definitely am capable of deep attention and in fact, it’s crucial in order for me to be productive a lot of the time. I’m writing a novel in my spare time (I have said, I’m a sucker for story telling) and it took me months before I could really write anything. I spent a lot of time planning, sure, but the only reason I was able to churn anything out at all was because I went to the beach during summer break where I had no wifi. No wifi = no distractions. I had too much spare time on my hands and so I read a whole book in 2 days and wrote 10 thousand words of my novel in 2 weeks. Maybe it isn’t much, but considering I’ve barely written 3 thousand since being back… says a lot.

So society is hyper attentive – constantly on the move, wanting to absorb everything at once. It’s about time, really, because I’ll spend hours doing one thing and being productive yet feel like I’ve wasted time only to spend the same time doing nothing (watching TV, talking to friends, reading social media updates) and feel fulfilled in a different way. Multitasking has always seemed like the more appealing option; watch TV while doing homework, study for exams with a classical soundtrack, check Facebook while watching a movie. We want to be turned on 24/7 and the only time we really get a chance to stop that is when we completely disconnect, like I did when I had no wifi.

So do I have deep attention or hyper attention? The jury’s still out. I feel like I really work better and am naturally built for deep attention, but have been programmed in the modern tech age for the opposite.

P.S. My aim is to quote movies for the titles of these… let’s see how far I get before I give up! 10 points to whoever knows where this one is from.

Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in high school anymore

To cut a long story short, University is very different to High School. For starters, blog posts are considered assessable, which is interesting. When I first read that we had to make regular posts on the internet about our feelings and what we were studying, I was a little skeptical. I’ve blogged in the past (let’s not talk about the 2010 Lucy on blogspot with a blog entitled ‘Sunny’s Photographic Life’ – who even is Sunny? A question I’ll never get the answer to…) but never with this kind of importance.

I guess I still blog here and there, in a way, social media is a form of that now. I use Twitter and Facebook and even Instagram as a form of expressing my thoughts, but this is still a challenge. Those posts are limited with a word count of 150 (on Twitter anyway) and no one likes to read a paragraph long Instagram comment. I learnt, like most other people my age, how to express my thoughts quick and to the point. This is a different take, a more traditional one and I’d like to see where it goes.

I used to write regular diary entries too – and someone at Uni told me that that’s the essence of blogging really. So I figure I’d start here, telling you a little about myself before I get stuck into talking about Media or Cinema Studies or anything else intellectually driven. So… Hi! I’m Lucy, I’m 18 years old and I, like everyone else here, have a love for film making. My passion is story telling – whether that be writing (scripts or otherwise) or visualising them in cinematic form. And I watch far too many TV Shows and movies, which is probably why I picked the studies that I did. I have a cat called Violet and you’d probably find out soon or later that I really really love all cats. I live in Northcote, so getting to RMIT campus is about a 20 minute train ride – lucky considering some people have come from across Australia to study here. I will be posting on here regularly, obviously, it’s school work… so I’ll see you around, I guess.

P.S. I hope all you Cinema Studies students appreciate the pun in my title. I thought it was very witty.