Lonely PhD student? Just log in
Inger Mewburn was in ‘The Age’ the day after she spoke to us in a lecture!!!! Just shows how big and important blog writing is for absolutely anything!!! I knew she was an awesome speaker and the fact that she is getting newspaper recognition makes me want to hold on and embrace her stuff even more…I WILL NEVER LET GO!!!!
Exact sort of stuff she was talking to us about:
“I treat Twitter like a DJ treats a dance floor,” she says. “So, I play tunes for PhD students. I send out links on writing, on getting jobs, anything that comes my way that as a PhD student I would have liked.”
I like the idea of a blog being a forum – place to speak out and share absolutely ANYTHING:
Dr Mewburn says students often need support because the experience of undertaking a doctoral thesis can be gruelling. Hence her blog. “I invite anyone to write, so it’s a forum for them to talk about things that bother them; things that work and the successes,” Dr Mewburn says. “So I really see it as a newspaper for PhD students by PhD students and I’m the editor who has a bit more experience.”
OBVIOUSLY SHE IS TWITTERING ABOUT IT!!!
AND SO IS RMIT!!!
Just another blog
An interesting blog for the Melbourne Film Festival. 5 movie buffs had to watch 60 MIFF films in 17 days and blog about it!! This is just another example of a blog and all the different ways one can blog. I quite like the style of this one and the way he writes.
After two and a bit weeks, innumerable hours sitting in the dark and an accumulation of mental and physical defects, we finally arrive at the big number: 60. Turns out I didn’t need the full 17 days to watch and review 60 films. I did it in 16 days and one evening. But hey, who’s counting?
Yep yep yep
TREE OF LIFE!
I was so blown away my Terrence Malick’s new film, “The Tree of Life” that i wanted to find any way i could to turn it into a blog that relates to the course…I really struggled to do so!! What I did thing of though was something remotely to do with hypertext and hyperlinks. In a way it is some sort of a version of a hypertext essay in that so much is going on and the cuts occur so rapidly that it is almost like someone (or Malick) is pressing from link to another in order to create shots, sequences, scenes and eventually the final movie. Each shot is like a beautiful photograph and the cuts occur so suddenly as if going from one link to another…
The actual poster (displayed above) is also in a way a form of a hypertext essay through images. There are at least 50 squares with different shots and images from the movie and each one leads on to the next. It is almost like the movie in one poster in that the actual film does exactly what the poster portrays… different cuts and transitions of photographs and sequences. It is, in my eyes anyway, a hypertext essay through images…
You may think its pretty far fetched, and maybe it is…but this film has stuck with me so much it forced me to create a connection between it and networked Media.
‘Catfish’ – Directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman
Catfish is a documentary, made in 2010, involving a man being filmed by his friends as he builds a romantic relationship with a girl and a bond with her ‘family’ on Facebook.
I’m so happy because I didn’t really know what sort of stuff to write in my blog which is not part of the course content but relates to the course UNTIL i stumbled across ‘Catfish’!!!
I just watched this movie last night and realised i could write about it on my blog!! I thought i could do this as it has lots to do with networking and it was very relevant to the lecture we had with Nate. What really struck me about the film is how anyone can easily create a network. The girl in the film totally made up an entire life that was fake. She added Nev Schulman, who the story revolves around and pretended to be someone she wasn’t. She built an entire false family – complete with Mother and Father and two daughters, one of which had a romantic relationship over the internet and the phone. She created hundreds of false accounts and added herself in order to make herself seem like a real person. She merely downloaded a random person’s entire photo collection and claimed it as her own. She would write, post and comment on all her photos with all her other accounts. As Nate pointed out in his lecture, it is so easy for anyone to use the internet and do all sorts of things with it. It is accessible for anyone do whatever like – including identity theft.
What also occurred to me is how a random person in Michigan added a random person in New york which lead to an entire film being made. This also demonstrates the power of the internet and how everyone is connected all over the world through a huge network, and in this case facebook…
I just find it so fascinating that it is so easy to create an entire network of people…especially fake!!!!! It just shows how far the internet has come from Paul Baran’s original idea of distributed communications. The film has really stuck with me and it has made me think about the internet in an entirely different way. It makes me realise how many different ways the internet can be used, including making an entire false network of people. Now i realise how useful Nate’s lecture was and how it relates to all sorts of things in regards to networked media.
Anyway, I’ll stop babbling along and end it here…BUT…
It was an incredible experience watching the film, especially because I had no idea what it was going to be about and I feel it was a couple of hours well spent!!
