Before I say anything else, I have a confession to make: I love to read. A lot. And for a burgeoning academic, it's maybe the best trait to have.
Unless, of course, you're in your final semester of college taking 19 credits, among which is a class whose professor's pedagogy centers around a philosophy of assigning reading that goes along the lines of, "I want you to drink from a fire hose."
It's not that he expects us to imbibe so much our throats resemble a frog's, but rather that he's going to spray us with information, from which we should drink what we can.
But I love reading. I suppose really, the problem is that I don't like skimming. I just can't do it. I have a compulsion to read any article as closely as I can to pull out all the information, all the quotes, all the stylistic flair I want to borrow that I can. You'd think that as a fairly successful national circuit debater who's been arguably more successful as a coach, that I would have learned to skim. Or at least triage really effectively. But I haven't - I've really just fed my literary and theoretical obsession.
I mean, it’s why I came to school here in the first place. I went to American University for two years, studied cinema, and absolutely loved it. At AU, though, cinema studies is only a minor and by the end of my sophomore year I had already completed it. So I transferred so I could keep reading about film but with better professors, actually get credit for it, and not have to worry about so much about other fields of study. Granted, once I got here I realized that the world was changing and theatrical cinema wasn’t evolving in step, or really much at all (which Joseph Gordon-Levitt puts pretty nicely in his project hitRECord, or more specifically, in the hitRECord Accord – more on that in a later post). But that just means I had to be more discriminatory in my course selection so I could learn about emerging media outside of the film industry.
Of course, the bureaucratic structure of my new school has made that a bit harder than I initially imagined, which may be why in my final semester I’m taking two general education classes (which I have ebulliently railed against because, let’s face it, for a debate coach little is more satisfying than arguing about your own education), which, though interesting, are ultimately turning my healthy obsession into a frightful addiction. I simply do not have time to read the blogs I follow (and it’s not just a few, but a few dozen – and it was around a hundred before I hacked away at my reader list two days ago) and do my coursework.
I suppose that's why I'm writing this blog. Or, more specifically, I suppose that's why I'm writing about civic media on this blog. This way, not only will I stay on top of my reading, but I'll have to spend the time to analyze what I'm reading - and it will meet my requirements for another class, to boot! Of course, this does mean that I'll probably update more than once a week, and that I'll probably pull a lot of videos and images since otherwise I'd probably just understand the concepts as theory rather than how they relate to praxis, but hey, if I have a problem with loving to read, why not turn that into a problem with loving (or at least trying to love) to write?
No comments:
Post a Comment