reflections

I have always liked reading other peoples blogs. The best thing about blogs is that you can find one about anything and everything. I have attempted running my own blog like three times and it never has really succeeded because it ends up being like a journal for me, and then things just get to personal to share or I forget to update it for like four months. Whoops. I have had to blog for other classes before and it has always been successful! I really got to understand my classmates sense of humor and a lot about what we talked about on the blog was brought up in class for further discussions.

This semester it was hard for me to come up with actual relevant things to blog about. I focused on True Blood, but in my heart always knew someone else was out there writing the exact same thing I was saying. I think finding something relevant to blog about was the hardest part of this class, and getting my classmates to actually read it. I was not really interested in reality television but on the blog I did get a good dose of some good and interesting aspect of it, I mean, Toddlers and TIaras is a television show I will never watch, or forget thanks to this blog. I enjoyed blogging about things I liked and putting my own personality on what I find important in the television world.

When I revised my work, I looked at voice, and personality. I tried really hard to put more of that into each post. I also tried to eliminate summary, which is hard because as a blogger/writer you feel like you need to tell your audience EVERYTHING. For my last blog I decided to kind of play with television and try to engage more people in my post by offering up my fantasies of what I would like to see on T.V. The kind of writing I normally do is analysis on literature which is extremely stuffy and boring at times. Blogging is extremely different from that because I can talk about naked people, sex, drugs, fantasies, and just anything that comes to mind. There is no censor. Since I have always had a deep relationship with television, blogging about T.V. introduced me to a new world of people out there who appreciate the same shows I do, and have interesting things to say about them in their own blogs. Now, after my favorite television show airs new episodes I can literally read all the blogs about them twenty minutes later. Blogging has opened the doors to a new online community the surrounds my interests and makes me connected to other people. My thoughts on television have changed this semester because now I realize the amount of work that goes into planning a television show. There is a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes that I have never really appreciated until this class.

This whole year I have been writing about Renaissance English poetry, or American Transcendentalists. This class has helped me break out of the strict academic mold, and helped me re-find my voice as a writer through blogging, and all the assignments we have done in this class. In the future, I hope to not forget my voice when writing because it is the most important and effective asset I have when it comes to expressing myself. This class allowed me to re-find that part of myself and I hope I can incorporate in more down the road in graduate school. Analyzing TV has also helped me think critically and examine what goes on beneath the surface of a television show. Usually, I just watch a show and turn it off after being entertained, but now I think critically about what it takes to make that show, and what elements are in the show that are being targeted towards me. This type of critical thinking will help me analyze other mediums down the road in my career.

People easily sit around and bash television because of its negative effects it has on everyone. By analyzing and understanding the stereotypes and problems television can produce, it only makes viewers smarter and more educated about the culture they live in. Thinking critically about anything is a beneficial to everyone and because TV is so popular and widely watched, thinking critically about television can only help us understand the society that surrounds us.