Week #11

(Wednesday, November 15, 2006)

My group completed our activism project today before class. We booked a table in the atrium and set up each of our lap tops along the table to the Amnesty International webpage where people could sign an online petition. The petition promoted sending UN peacekeepers into Darfur to provide relief for the crisis. I roamed around the atrium talking to passers-by and even if they did not sign our petition, I handed out small fact sheets that gave information about what is happening in Darfur and the website link for where they can go to help.
The discussion about technology and media today was also intriguing. I’m not entirely certain how brainstorming our ideas benefited us, but maybe it was simply a way of getting us to interact in class differently. With these lists, we arguably determined the four most important inventions as far as their impact in media. Each of them to an extent made sense, but I still believe that we are capable of measuring the impact of a technology on society even fifty years old. Perhaps the impact of this technology will evolve in the future, but I nevertheless believe that we can, for instance, determine how the internet has affected modern society.
My image curation group is in the process of completing our curation, which will ideally be ready to present for nest week’s class. I chose not to work with my larger study group, but rather a smaller group of people for this task. I thought that it would be valuable to attempt working with different individuals for a change. We have decided to focus our curation on already existent photographs. These photographs will all be head shots of individuals so that there is a determinable expression on each of their faces. I think that finding some recognizable images would also improve on this idea. I think that our curation has a lot of potential if we can find pictures that portrays this concept.