A couple of reoccurring themes stood out to me in my review of blog posts and a comment I did. The first is my interest in exploring gender and race. I explored both in my first blog post, “The Final Irrational Girl,” and then race again in “Tillich’s Symbol & Baldwin’s Letter.” In both, I discussed where blackness fits into a white dominated genre (horror). I am not too surprised by these areas because throughout my four years at Davidson, I often take on topics of gender and race. When writing about gender, I tend to take a feminist stance, as reflected by the line in “The Final Irrational Girl,” “While horror has treated its female characters misogynistically, it is also the genre that’s given us “the final girl” trope (basically what Pinedo was referring to as female heroes; means the last female alive to confront the monster). Do you think postmodern horror is perpetuating misogynistic images of women in Hollywood or changing them?” I am aware that often in my writing I try to ‘complicate’ my ideas and that quote is a good example of when I complicate my argument by placing it next to an idea that challenges my previous statements and takes my argument to the next level. I often think of my writing as building my paper (or blog post) brick by brick, and I can see that reflected in the way I have composed each sentence.
Another reoccurring topic in my posts is social media and how it produces a ‘lack of the real’. I discuss social media in both “Digital Zombie” and in my comment on Alivia’s “Instagram Memorials” post. In “Digital Zombie,” my post about the Black Mirror episode we watched, I wrote, “Social media cannot fully replicate Ash because it works on the assumption that people put their whole lives on social media, which is impossible. Even with the addition of Martha’s personal messages and videos, the artificial intelligence cannot account for Ash’s life before social media which founded who he is and moments not captured between Ash and Martha, represented by zombie Ash’s inability to react when Martha places his hand on her chest.” Social media cannot fully represent a person and lacks human qualities that Ash cannot recreate. In my comment on Alivia’s post, I mention how direct messaging a memorialized Instagram page makes the living user feel as if they can still communicate with the dead, but of course the account will not respond. I called this form of communication a “digital letter,” but still lacks the same as communicating with a person who is living. I am kind of surprised to see this connection between social media and ‘lack of the real’ because social media plays a big part of my life without much day-to-day thought.
From my first post to my last post, I think I shifted away from topics that I tend to discuss (race and gender) and discussed technology more and how it affects our culture, which was a crucial goal of the class. This is a general theme represented in my final paper discussing autonomous vehicles and marketing, and just by going through these posts I can definitely see what led up to me selecting this topic.