Reflexive Piece

I find myself staring at a blank screen at odd times of the day wondering….what do I have to say today? Blogging has allowed me to open the tap of my own destruction – my mind. In it are so many little ideas and thoughts that never seemed to be fully expressed. Blogging allowed me to vent about the issues that had bee tickling me in my sensitive areas. As blogging was purely a new thing for me, I found it surprisingly unchallenging when it came to expressing my own opinion.
My main area of concern was trying to communicate to other people the need to be constantly vigilant in the university experience. Many people I know have seemingly sat back and watched life float on by without even stretching out a pinky to feel the temperature. Blogging for most of us was a love, hate relationship. I personally loved the opportunity to write and say what I felt like in relation to our blog theme but, I hated the fact that we were seemingly bombarded with so many other compulsory tasks from journalism as well as our other subjects that there was little time to rant on about what I wanted to.
I first term, we were basically spoon fed the topics we were to use in the course, and then blogging came along and unshackled our bubbling brains. I think for me and some of the class, blogging was a free easy way of doing as we please without having to stick to one specific genre. Blogging allowed us to mesh together all sorts of ideas and genres without any form of limitation besides the ones we had set for ourselves. I actually don’t think that blogging changed too much of my ideas on reporting, it seemed to me to be just another way to talk abut the same sort of issues but streamlined into an imaginary audience. I would say blogging actually inspired more interesting and diverse work than what we experienced in the preceding terms. The liberal dose of literary freedom I think inspired a whole lot of great writing and did improve our skills. I honestly think my own skills especially with profile writing improved considerably to steady 7 out of 10.
The fact that our lecturers churned out weekly assignments got a bit tedious and made me write just so I could get it out of the way. It was like being continuously prodded to work when most people including myself just wanted to let loose and say whatever but could not really because we had to immerse ourselves into the that specific assignment I order to get decent marks. I had a couple of story ideas that I wanted to put onto the blog but I found that I was less keen to write because I felt a little uninspired to do so. As a group we found that group work did not actually suite our own individual characters so we often did not communicate about a lot and sort of just did what we had to make everything work smoothly. So our meetings usually ended with only two members left!
Blogging is journalism made by the individual for other individuals, reaching far into a whole community of thought. It is actually a form of new media and citizen journalism, whereby individuals create, publish and distribute selected media forms to a selected audience. World media is shifting towards this type of journalism where people are in sole control of the type of media they need to interact with. In this regard the them of surviving first year was not too restricting because it was actually had a lot of opportunities and different topics which could be compressed into a single train of thought that we could use successfully as we were first years. I guess it was a bit restricting in the sense that we had to deal strictly with first year issues although indirectly we touched on the following years of university.
Researching was actually a cautious affair because we could not present created facts or manufactured material, we needed to provide concrete information so that we did not mislead the audience into believing the wrong thing or giving the wrong impression for Rhodes. Even in the selection of sources of information, caution had to be exercised to ensure the information gelled with our blog. I actually found that it was not very hard to find willing sources to talk to as most of them actually sympathized with us “little first years”. This made the task considerably more manageable. I also found that when I wrote up some of the pieces I was able to experiment with one or two ideas I had read up on or from the first term course. It was interesting how I actually had to consider a whole lot of aspects of my writing on our blog. I had to present as much factual information as possible to present to the reader without making it sound too boring or far fetched. I had to make sure I wrote in a way that actually marketed Rhodes and attracted readers from a wide audience. For instance I wrote a profile on someone who used marijuana as a means to deal with the pressures and stresses of first year. I had to try as best as possible to try not to add my own feelings about marijuana as well as the knowledge that marijuana is illegal in the country.
Overall, blogging was a unique experience for me that offered a chance for me to deal with a new media tool. It provided me the opportunity to create my own story ideas and verbalize them in a blog. Sadly I did not take full advantage of this opportunity in terms of creating my own ideas and stories as well as issues that affected me at Rhodes during my first year.

Smooth Operator