Medium Specificity Assignment: "My Story"

 I intended my project to be both a celebration and a commentary on my chosen medium: Snapchat. In the Snapchat app, in addition to sending picture and video messages to friends, you can add snaps to your "story" which stay there for your friends to see for 24 hours before disappearing permanently. These stories are made up of small snapshots and short videos which explore moments in your life in a very fleeting way.  I wanted to explore how Snapchat could be used to tell a broad, personal story. Something deeper and more meaningful than what it is usually used for. I played around with the idea of telling a story from literature, or a specific experience I have had, but I settled on a brief summary of my life, because I wanted to see what creative tools I could use within this medium I could use. By using the Snapchat tools such as emojis, drawing, filters, and text, I was celebrating the medium and showing the way these tools can enhance the effectiveness of storytelling with pictures. Creating this project made me realize that the stories have amazing depth. There was so much more I could have told about my life, but couldn't within the confines of this medium. But something about having these limitations, and also the creative tools at my disposal helped me to create something more interesting than if I had just been writing or talking about my life story.  

Six Word Memoir: Home

One home behind, the other ahead.

For me this six word memoir expresses the beauty and bitter sweetness of the transitional idea of home. I grew up in St. Louis, but my family moved to the Minneapolis area after I graduated from high school, and right before I moved to Provo for school. Going "home" for Christmas is always a little strange because I don't have emotional connections to Minneapolis, other than the fact that my parents live there. Provo is just as much home for me, if not more so than my parents house, which is hard for me to completely come to terms with. My process of creation for this piece was interesting, because I wasn't thinking of these concepts when I took the picture. I just was taken with how striking the sunset looked over the mountains, and snapped a picture. However, looking back at it afterwards and recalling how I felt at that time while coming back to Utah after Christmas break brought these  words to my mind in conjunction with the photograph. I think that this would be a great activity to do with students in a play writing unit. Perhaps each student could come prepared with a 6 word memoir, and then they would switch with another student and write a scene fully fleshing out the story portrayed in the memoir.

Thinking and Writing about Digital Media

In general I am more of a consumer of media than I am a creator. I spend a lot of time in media consumption, for good or for bad. As I think over all of the websites and social media sites I use with regularity, it seems a little excessive, but they all serve slightly different purposes in my life. I use Facebook mostly to keep track of friends far and near, as well as keeping connected to events in my ward and community, although I rarely post on it. I look at Instagram as a way to present a more artistic and carefully curated view of myself and my life, as well as to see interesting photographs from other. Snapchat is my way of keeping in close contact with only my dearest friends and family. I am also active on Pinterest, where I can gather ideas and inspiration for recipes, art, fashion, etc. Those are my main venues of social media, but my media consumption definitely doesn’t stop there. I love movies and TV shows, and I am slowly trying to wean myself off of Netflix since my sister is getting rid of her account (which I use), although so far that has not been going so well. I will often have a show playing on my phone rather than music when I am getting dressed or cooking dinner. This has become such a habit that I have trouble doing things in silence. I also use Youtube to watch videos and sometimes to post videos. I have a channel with dreams of fame that has not been updated for months. But maybe someday I will get around to editing and posting all of my videos which my friends and I have filmed. I also use digital media for many scholarly purposes, such as online research. I have benefited greatly from the fact that so many books have portions online through google book, where I can find search digitally for information for papers without having to check out so many books from the library  As far as physical media I use, right now I am limited to my phone and public computers since my laptop is out of commission. 

With all of the choices out there for digital media, it is important to have some guidelines for  what we choose to use. I think that we should examine what we actually use each tool for, and make sure that there is a purpose to using each medium. For example while I use a variety of social media tools, there are some that I don't feel the need for, such as twitter and tumblr. For some people maybe these serve a purpose, but for me I think that using these sites would just be another distraction. In addition to considering the time commitment, I think that it is important to consider the content of the things we interact with. I try to consider whether the things I consume are wholesome. When I say wholesome I don't just mean whether the media has "inappropriate" content as the word has come to be used as, but I mean that media should be wholesome in the way that food is wholesome. It should feed your soul in some important way. I think that this especially is an important guideline which can be transferred to the classroom - make sure that the media we use with our students serves an important purpose, and that it makes them think, or builds their character in some way.