:: The more I change… ::


I had my mass communications class tonight, the one for which I'm doing this blog. As part of the marking strategy for this class, each student has to do a ten minute presentation, in which they are supposed to analyze an example or sets of examples from a type of media within a certain medium.

(My own is set to happen during the very last class of the semester...three weeks to go...The topic? Blogs, of course!)

Now, normally I keep my mouth shut in such situations and don't directly criticize other students' work openly during the class itself. It's kind of my own version of the Golden Rule (do unto... etc. etc.). Tonight, though, I broke the rule. Badly.

Why?

One of the students got up to speak about "peer to peer" technologies through the Internet. In other words, file-swapping. And rather than do an analysis of the medium of file swapping and how the media close out the people who use file swapping technologies for non-illegal or non-illicit purposes in the media’s representations on this subject, this student proceeded to demonize the format, cut down the Internet as a medium, while simultaneously somehow managing to glorify the "illicitness" of file swapping for music, software etc.

All of it within a set of value judgments that had no place or purpose within the argument. Oh...and they got the theory wrong (De Certeau's concepts of space and place and containment).

Now...before I continue on this topic, I should point out that I have a soft spot for the online medium, in case you hadn’t already noticed that fact. This blog is proof. I am also guilty of sometimes trying to "own" this topic when out in the meatworld discussing it with others. I get proprietorial and protective of it as a topic and I am not as open-minded sometimes as I know I should be.

This may be what happened today. I'm not exactly sure. What I do know is that, all of a sudden, when this student introduced their topic, I noticeably *perked*…and then just as quickly deflated, then hardened, as they setup the topic. I had a definite problem with the way this student framed it,. In essence, I began to feel they were demonizing the Internet and were leaving out large parts of factual evidence that would otherwise have torn their argument apart and rendered it useless.

I won’t go into detail on the content of their presentation. The actual content is possibly irrelevant to my issue with it. The sad truth is that, during the last half of this presentation, I was biting my lip and partially hiding the person from view with my hands, physical indicators to me that I’m trying to keep a lid on it, trying to keep my mouth shut and my brain disengaged from an argument it desperately wants me to make, preferably out loud.

I was doing okay until the Q&A session afterwards, until the student responded to another student’s question/challenge.

Then I lost it…

I spoke…

I was a fool.

I should have kept my mouth shut. My passion for the topic was entirely too evident and my lack of good reasoning argument and of an ability to express a 360 degree view of the issue was completely evident in my response. I proceeded to point out why the missing factual evidence invalidated the student’s argument, why they themselves had just committed the cardinal sin of Cultural Studies by deliberately framing an issue to exclude various representations of it, and I went on to speak about who was silenced in their representation of the topic.

An awful lot of stuff to say for someone who wanted to practice the Golden Rule and keep her mouth shut.

I tried to make amends to the student afterwards, but flubbed that too, it seems.

I learned from this tonight. I learned that I’m very testy about people speaking about the Internet in ways that I interpret to be misguided, factually incorrect or just narrow-minded. I learned that I can still be overtly impetuous, after years of trying to be otherwise, in ways that can come back to bite me in the butt. I learned that my need to make sure others understand the view I espouse as “right” can still overpower my desire to be egalitarian, inclusive, socially considerate.

Most especially, though, I learned through my own actions that I, too, can be guilty of shutting people out of my own representation and image of what the I-Space is, or should be. By speaking up tonight the way I did against my fellow student in our class, I am guilty of hypocrisy.

Sobering realization, these.

Sobering, and perhaps pertinent to my exploration of this notion of framing, representation and the nature of reality within the I-Space.