Livin la vida Lecture #1

…How do I put this? Let’s just say for the majority of the lecture I thought I was in the wrong room… and if it weren’t for the familiar and friendly faces (holla!)… I probably would have gotten lost on campus in search for another nonexistent Networked Media lecture (symposium???).

I’m not quite sure what I was expecting, but what I experienced definitely wasn’t it. So I’ve come up with a list of reasons why I was so opposed to this week’s “introductory” Networked Media lecture:

1. Nobody put the “Network” in Networked Media. When I hear the word “network” I think social network (with remnants of the networks unit from VCE Further Maths that I have failed to suppress), a.k.a. THE social network a.k.a. Facebook and its social media counterparts. It was barely touched on.
2. “This isn’t a lecture. It was an unlecture. But now it’s not. It’s a symposium.” – I’m yet to look up the word “symposium”.
3. Building 56. Why.
4. You could’ve had me at “Hello”. Unlike my other courses, Networked Media lacked an introduction – no synopsis of the course content, the outcomes, the purpose… nothing, just straight into it. And while this could have potentially been refreshing in comparison to my other lectures that week, it came across as jarring and confusing. With no context it was hard to make sense of and subsequently form links between the extensive knowledge we were receiving and knowledge we already had.
5. “Scarcity”? More like Scare City. My cute and romanticised first-year dreams of becoming a media mega star were crushed in the first half hour of the lecture. I don’t know about you, but putting yourself in debt before your life begins and then being told you’re entering a dying industry and that it’s unlikely you’ll get a job and/or an average to slightly-better-than-average salary isn’t very motivational…
6. You mean vlogging? Adrian mentioned that ‘video blogging’ has become redundant. I firmly believe that this is entirely incorrect. If anything it’s at its peak, with the likes of YouTubers such us vlogbrothers (a.k.a. JOHN FREAKIN GREEN), pewdiepie, Tyler Oakley, Zoella, Tanya Burr and hundreds more currently reigning pop/internet culture, and participating in growing YouTube conventions, as well as spreading into literature, tv, film, music, journalism, cosmetics and more. This statement enraged the YouTube fangirl within me.
7. I was hungry. ‘Nuff said.

While Adrian did raise some really great arguments, their lack of context in conjunction with the grand number of topics only lightly touched on in the hour lecture was ineffective for me personally, and slightly migraine-inducing.

So here’s to next week’s ‘lecture’… fingers crossed it’s not a repeat offender!