I really enjoyed this class and learned a lot more than I thought I was going to…not because it was going to be a bad class but because I thought that I pretty much knew everything already! The wikipedia paper/project was really interesting because I didn’t know just how much work went into each entry. I didn’t think it was organized at all and only used it for stupid facts. But, actually there are people who fix any edits that are incorrect. Dr. Markman even brought up the wiki page of the haymarket riots…i think?…and how there was this giant debate about a guy who posted about there actually was evidence against the people charged or something? I just thought that was interesting. I chose The Big Bang Theory and there are so many references and people discussing what information should be used and what shouldn’t.
With our media projects and starting a blog…it was a lot harder than I thought. It pretty much took me 2 seconds to set up a tumblr account, set up a theme, post some entries, and find other accounts to follow that were either very relevant to mine or just things I liked. However, I didn’t really think it would be that hard to promote it…boy was I wrong. We learned about how with the cheap tools, like a computer that can record, edit, and post, being used today it’s very easy for regular people to become producers. Even people who create blogs can gain a lot of followers and become semi-famous, like kerry and her I love memphis blog. But it is actually really hard to get people to look at what you create! It is pretty exciting however when people “like” your stuff or reblog it. It really makes you feel good that there are people who like or have at least looked at something that you care about and are working hard on. This kind of ties into all the stuff we learned that we tied into our artist profile paper. Sometimes people’s blogs or whatever do get looked at because of luck but there is actually a lot of self-promoting through other mediums.
The main reason I liked this class, besides the wonderful Dr. Markman, was how everything we learned is relevant to what is going on now. Unlike a history class where you learn about some person who did this one little thing that doesn’t really resonate to today, we encounter everything we talked about and examined like wikipedia, people’s blogs, the idea of an increase in streaming videos and less actual tv watching, etc. It was such an interesting class!