Reflecting on the Midterm

I was relieved to be able to take our midterm home, as I knew I would need a lot of time to wade through the concepts and be able to successfully explain and interrelate them. However, when I sat down to begin working on the midterm, I found it both difficult and somewhat frustrating because of the overlap of ideas and terms in the first section. I kept wanting to define the terms I had chosen from the left column with ideas we had talked about in class that were not included in the list on the right, like instrumentum, or with people who were conspicuously absent (as Erika noted, Jean Baudrillard). However, the terms were obviously very carefully picked to force us to deal with this overlap and absence, and I was certainly forced to overcome this by making some interesting, and some far-fetched, connections.

I thought that the second section was the most relevant because we had to apply the ideas we've studied in class to society as a whole, or at least view the concept in a critical light that made it seem more pertinent to our view of media and society. These are all things that are important for a digital artist to consider, and will certainly help in creating perspective and context for future work.

The essay was definitely a challenge, but I felt that, again, connecting so many of these ideas with each other was eye-opening, if confusing.

Like Erika, I would be very interested to read what some of my other classmates wrote because I think it would be enlightening to try to understand the connections other people might draw between some of these ideas. Perhaps we would find that a number of us drew similar conclusions and form some interesting theories as a result.