Techno cripple, not me!

“Techno cripple” has been used to describe my inability to successfully engage technology. I grew up in a household where we were equipped with the basics to function but not at the level of the techno boffins who have wed the web. I was born in the information age but have a strong feeling that I was drastically misplaced. The point of all this is that when the amusing duo i.e. our lecturers said that the entire term would be dedicated to blogging, the walls began to close in around me and cold sweat dripped from my forehead. I immediately slipped into the fear of the unknown and could not see a way out. Then the dreaded words, “team work” and “surviving first year” skipped from the lecturer’s smiles and the walls collapsed and I was trapped under a pile of blogging rubble. It has been six weeks since I was pulled from the debris by the capable hands of my team members and now I am proud to say that “techno cripple” is no longer applicable because my group and I managed to create, “Confessions of a Crazy Couch Potato” our very own, very successful blog.

It was not all fun and games because the assignment initially seemed restricting and group work is an ominous word that seems to cut eagerness in half at its very mention. I had heard about blogging but it was part of a world that I wished to understand but could not access. In the beginning blog babble swirled around me and prevented me from attaining my usual pushy position in any group because I lacked the knowledge and expertise. So I took a humble step back and relied on my team to pull us through. Our group had conflicting interests but each brief allowed us to use the differences to our advantage because each first year experience is unique. So instead of having to push and pull until we had one solid idea all we had to do was allow our experiences to flow and the goal was achieved with smiles on our faces. Lack of creativity was only as large as the laziest member in our group but even that did not play a huge part because after the initial assignment of creating the blog, everything else was a one man show.

Every assignment presented the similar problem of keeping in tune with the character of the blog, which is funny but critical and the task of pleasing our audience. The latter was at first an issue but as I began to understand the genre of blogging and all it entails I realised that although you may be writing to a particular audience, you cannot restrict who will read your blog. The prospect of the entire world being able to read my blog did not seem daunting at all but exciting, which is how I began to view blogging as the term continued. It was no longer a room collapsing but growing and I could not believe the enjoyment I derived from it. A major influence that allowed for this new found freedom was that our blog was the personal type and to be able to write in a personal style, within confines that are only limiting if you decide that they are, allows for a flow of creativity. Genres were one viewed as constricting but in fact some of the best work is produced within confined spaces. Added to this is that whatever could not be expressed in words could be made up in a picture and because we had been given photography tips, taking decent photographs was no longer daunting either.

At almost every lecture or tutorial I heard students moan and groan about this course because they could not find a strong enough link between journalism and blogging to get excited about the assignment. At times like these I was so happy that I had not let my fear of the unknown or technical incapacities stunt my growth because blogging has everything to do with journalism. Blogging has become competition to everyday news reporting and a powerful competition at that because it lacks the restrictions that are found in media organisations. Added to this is that businesses snatch up journalists who have a multiplicity of skills and as journalists any extra skill should be grabbed with both hands and feet because it is a difficult industry in which to survive sufficiently.

Like most people I love living life through laughter but when it comes to work, off comes the clown outfit and out comes the serious suite. This was not allowed when dealing with our blog because we were all about the funny. This presented a problem because all the assignments required us to dig into the lives of first years and bring out their issues. The concerns that face students are far from laughable so it was a challenge to deal with them without detracting from the seriousness but I had learnt in another course that humour is an effective way to bring even closer attention to pertinent issues and so I put this piece of information to good use that pleased my sources and people who read our blog.

To conclude we were given the chance to get extra credit by writing posts which we could put on the group blog or we could create our own blog, which linked to the team blog. The topic was again to write about first year and the response to this was again an audible moan from the students. I was groaning along with them but now bite my tongue because it forced me to take a greater interest in my life at university. I disliked Rhodes when I arrived and have struggled to survive first year but this assignment taught me to experiment with my surroundings and with the little bit of happiness or the lot of sadness that I have and turn it into something that has the potential to become something that can be taken seriously.