My Blog is being established in line with a subject I am doing in my Masters degree. The subject is Transient Spaces and the focus of this subject is Social Software and Community.
I am in the process of developing a strategy for the content of my blog and I am researching methods to promote it within the online community and from without.
The subject: Transient Spaces has a theoretical basis and in the last few weeks we have read Tonnies and considered his ideas about Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Gemeinschaft is a definition or a description of the nature of a small community whilst Gesellschaft is a concept that Tonnies has develped in relation to "the wider community".
Earlier in the subject we looked at a Theorist called Delanty, whose ideas pertained to myths and contemporary culture. Our subject Transient Spaces appears to leading us through or into the arena of the tension between Society and Community, and consideration of how these to organising forces operate together and separately.
We will be assessed through the content of our Blogs. These Blogs are required to reference Theorists and I have choosen to work in a Post Modernist manner and expose the form with the content and the concept.
The Blogs are to explore community and to investigate the nature of community in relation to ourselves and to a key media theorist. The media theorists that have influenced me the most are Lev Manovich and Marshall McLuhan, Donna Harraway and Maragret Werthheim.
The questions I am trying to deal with at present pertain to the content of my Blog. I have been encouraged to do a Blog about the recent Bushfires in Victoria as I was present at Black Saturday and in the countryside in the aftermath. However I was a visitor to the area - not a landowner but a city person - who lost no house or family .
But I did lose many important and valued things - importantly 9 Foolscape folders of my Masters research!!!!!!
The difficulty is that I know no one in the area and Marysville, the township I was staying in, is all but incinerated by the fires - there is nothing left. I have gone back to the area - which was a fantastic experience which I will wrtie about later - and I have taken some photos of a place I lived in a few years ago when I was homeless - yes homeless - life is interesting.
I want to talk about hope and fear and the difference between the city and the country and link these ideas to representation and story telling and expose forms and avenues of expreeeion that allow for understanding and assistance to be generated - I guess I am talking about generating and maintaing communities within communities. Like the analogy that Manovich makes from the Dziga Vertov movies, Man with a Movie Camera, which exposes the process of movie creation whilst it itself is playing, evolving, moving and concluding.
There are many questions to resolve and I look forward to sharing them with you.
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Thomas Rogers
Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
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