Perhaps the most interesting reading for me this week was the Dibbell article, "Rape in Cyberspace". I'm not going to lie, I have talked to people online that I haven't met in person, but the idea of getting so invested in an imagined online community to consider someone making a voodoo doll of you and manipulating it on a text-only online server a violation of personal space is just ludicrous to me. It really does speak to the power of such imagined communities, going all the way back to the very first reading of the class.
And that's what I was struck with most this week - how everything has seemed to come together. Wednesday's lecture really hit home, because it helped me to finally realize what I should have figured out in the first place: that, as Prof. Chun said, you have to give in to ideas that you disagree with to really expand yourself and learn. There were many readings this semester I disagreed with, and one screening in particular I intensely disliked, but in retrospect, it all fits in nicely and creates quite the incredible library of voices to draw on.
The enduring question for me from this course is, what does media foster? Community? Individuality? Conformity? Self-expression? Or both? It creates communities - both imagined and real; for example, I can ask millions of people around the country about the latest episode of The Office and instantly strike up a conversation. But at the same time, I am encouraged to upload my own media to YouTube and create my own material on Facebook wall postings and messages; certainly, this is blatant free labor, but there is no denying that these are invaluable forms of expression for our generation. Whether or not I take another MCM course, it will be difficult for me from here on out to look at media the same way when I watch the news or hear about a new social networking or Web 2.0 initiative. I suppose the final question to ask is not how media does, but how it will do - how it will evolve. What will we be viewing, listening to, taking part in decades from now?
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