The main way I engaged with the blogging was to connect the reading to personal experience and sometimes other ideas relating to the subject matter in our class. I don’t often blog for other classes, so to me the exercise seemed more oriented towards personal experience or feeling, at least at first. My blog posts are often connect often connected to personal experience instead of abstract academic concepts—places I’d visited, things I’d read, etc. Though I maintain the first-person perspective an attitude throughout my posts, they have changed from more personal to professional, I’d say.
For example, in one of my first posts, I write: “The most disturbing element of Dead Set was certainly the gore, at least in my experience. I’m not a horror fan, and thus turn my head or close my eyes during the inevitably violent moments of my favorite TV shows or movies.” This is obviously a very firsthand and un-academic sentence, though I go on to talk about concepts and quotes having to do with the topic. However, by my last post, I did not mention personal reactions/feelings at all, but did relate the subject matter (Jackson’s “Broken World” thinking) to a book I had read.
In terms of concepts I revisit, the main two are haunting—haunted tourism, Edison’s spirit phone—despite that I haven’t considered this a topic in which I am particularly interested. The next topic is ethics of technology—Black Mirror, Slenderman, and dark/toxic tourism. I found myself circling around the topic of ethics with questions: Should we be doing this with technology? Should we be thinking about death this way? These questions, of course, apply to this class in general.