Adrain wrote:

“When we’re challenged, made uncomfortable, our mental map, and our reptilian brain, responds with fight or flight. Fight is to not wonder why but to decide it’s broken. Flight is to run away (i.e. not come). Either is a small way to respond where while you think you’re asserting agency it is in fact the instinctual opposite.”

I took the time to analyze my reaction to this course: it’s structure (or non-structure), it’s ambitions, freedoms, everything according to my perception.

My initial perceptions (and I suspect I share these with much of the class) was that Networked Media would become that one course you do every semester in which you invariably slack off. My head was telling me I was too airy-fairy, too wishy-washy, too whimsy and led by a mad professor whose teaching methods came to him in a dream (Okay, I only added that last part for dramatic impact and comic relief).

 

But yes, I made an assumption.

 

I have this trait I’m still developing, where I watch carefully the thoughts I give power to, the ones I choose to entertain. I’ve learnt over various experiences that thoughts are beyond powerful in cultivating our beings. For me, my practice of watching my thoughts is an attempt to be aware of my awareness (if that makes sense). In other words, to be more aware of my consciousness, how I perceive things internally rather than simply what I am perceiving externally. Assumptions, as I’m realizing, are rooted in the external perceptual, and so are kind of one-dimensional.

I’m getting slightly off topic here so let me bring it back to this course—I am giving it a solid, conscious go. I acknowledged my assumptions, made peace with them but told them they were unfair and ungrounded.  And perhaps most importantly, I acknowledged the ambitions of this course as pretty much being to get us to come around to thinking like this, or somewhat like it. To not be dismissive and defensive, with that standard “fight or flight” response, but to stop, examine and at least try to understand what is being proposed, challenged, envisaged.

I’ll give credit where credit is due—it is a bold method of teaching and an even bolder method of learning if it is actually and fully embraced and drained of pre-conceptions.

 

(and speaking of assumptions, check out THE ASSUMPTION SONG !)