Final Reflection
This Writing course challenged by ideas of communication in ways that I have not previously faced before. I can definitely say that some of the projects we worked on and topics we addressed were a little confusing at first. The differences between this course and a typical writing class were somewhat uncomfortable at first, but I believe I have become a stronger writer and communicator through it. I say communicator instead of simply writing, because of our exploration of visuals and how they can give added dimensions to what we are trying to saw. Seeing as UCSB's Communication department doesn't really explore this aspect of marketing or "going viral", so it was definitely a valuable experience.Â
Working on the video project was one of the projects out of my comfort zone, and something that I would have never pursued on my own outside of this class. In some ways, our project was more like writing an essay more so than other projects. Because we chose a poem, we had to analyze and deconstruct it before deciding on how we wanted to eventually portray it in the video. This analyzing phase was very similar to how I would go about exploring a deeper meaning in a poem if I was going to write an essay on it as well. That is where the similarities ended however- the rest was deciding on images to convey the anti media message. This was a lot easier for me than trying to write about diction, imagery, or allusions and I feel like the message was created in a way that could potentially be received by a much  larger audience. While I do believe essay writing has merit, I think that most of the time time half heartedly breeze through writing papers which ultimately diminished their worth.Â
Discussing virality in academia was an interesting conversation, especially in the aspects that the "popularity" contest could ultimately affect professors, researchers and graduate students. In some ways, this already affects researchers through tracking how many times articles are cited by other articles. Though it does make sense to track these metrics in an effort to make sure that university researchers are working on material is worthwhile and well received, there always is the chance that important research may not receive popularity when it is first released. I think that discussing vitality in forms of teaching may be interesting to pursue as well, as a form of tracking student's opinions about professors. At a research university like UCSB, many of our professors are the best and brightest researchers but this doesn't always translate to teaching skills. This however, would have the same problems of measuring virality in the academic setting as would measuring research citation metrics. Academia is rapidly changing, and more changes will come in the following years. Virality will most likely become an increasing part of academia, and I think it will be interesting to see how it plays out.
