Julie Joins In · Thursday November 16, 2006
Julie Frizzo, Communications Whiz, fellow TWU alum, and she did the EXACT SAME PROGRAM at Goldsmiths (MA in Media and Communications) as I am now pursuing.
“Anyway, I focused on new media and interpersonal communication (if/how it affected our generation’s communication) and definitely had to narrow it down to certain people, places, etc. to have anything specific to say. Sort of a “revolution or remediation?” debate. It is hard to narrow it down, esp. when you want to take a broad look, but realistically can you determine anything that broadly with the time you have to research and the short word-length? It’s really a big paper. Not a book. So the problem is that we research as though we are writing a book. You will have waaaaay too much that you can’t use, and it’s frustrating! Not to stress you out further, just to give it a realistic scope. Like how much can you actually ascertain or prove, within the limits of this project? You are really just taking an original spin on some little corner and recommending where further research would be helpful to the community. This realization made me totally switch my topic – originally looking more at film and psychology. But realized it was more of a PhD size project.
“Have you thought of how you wanted to go about it? Qualitative observations from a number of different sites? The idea Natalie mentioned of following a particular topic or debate is a decent option to narrow it down. Do you have a potential idea that could work for that? Even if the blogs did challenge the hegemony, how would you show that? What would qualify as a concrete example of that? If you can find something, that’d be cool. But you might research the hell out of it and not have a lot to say. I guess you need to make the hypothesis, check it out, and potentially say “I have nothing to say.” I guess that’s alright too! I sort of sat on the fence in my conclusions as well… giving reasons for both sides.”
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