I feel my blog has been a learning journey, establishing then questioning my original preconceptions of culture, taking them apart and rebuilding them again.
I have experienced multi-model transliteracies through the blog, visual artefact and ethnography, struggled with the varying notion of order to access information. Seen the real become unreal and then made real again. I have visited and become part of various communities. Then I went on to look at relationships with technology which lead full circle to question the original assumptions of Utopia and Dystopia!
The running theme for me has been the post-human, which I have interpreted as the – The space in between – Now and the future, between people, community members and between human and technology – the place where ideas can bounce back and forth, replicated, imitated, develop and continued – which are of course essentially the blocks of teaching on the course. It has led me to my final destination which is looking at the transference of information in this space and the idea of creative replication.
Although I didn’t know it, this started in week 1′s bog post – Just Awesome! The first appreciation of a congregation of people coming together to create a positive event. This was a great example of Culture with a capital C being used as part of a popular culture activity – the flash mob. What is interesting for me is how social networks are used to bring people together to form a temporary community who are all engaged in similar activity but without the necessary relationship bond of interaction a community usually requires. I reflected on the most apt modes for the literacies to be represented in and experimented with different modes and looked at what was appreciated and found that the key word was APTNESS for the representation. This followed with my own participation in a cultural meme – The Harlem Shake which felt important due to the work on Ethnographies Unfortunately, I couldn’t share my imitation, but this was probably fortuitous as…… The journey has come full circle for me with the realisation that we are already part of a dystopian society, where the real is unreal and Global Capitalism is in fact driving the “Space in between” in the direction it wants us to go!
My journey has been amazing and has given me a greater understanding of what is culture in the past, now and in the future and how is it transferred and replicated. The Harlem Shake meme which was commercially led, is a real time example of one of the earliest readings by Bell (2001) about the counterculture leading technological and thus commercial advances.
It has been great being part of something so public, and I hadn’t quite appreciated what that would be like and the links I would make with others outside of our community. Thanks very much to all who have listened, read, commented and interacted with me over the course of this study.
