Blogging Grad School

I’m going back to school this fall. This is my first blogpost about it.

I accepted an offer from Emerson College to enter their M.A. in Media Arts program in September with a concentration in New Media Production. This is a big shift.

Since 2003, I’ve been largely focused on academic research involving the political economy of communcation and cultural studies. Dallas Smythe, Herb Schiller, Vincent Mosco, Oscar H. Gandy, Jr., Robert McChesney (in the U.S. and Canada) and Nicholas Garnham, James Curran, Colin Sparks, Peter Golding, and Graham Murdock (in the U.K.) and many others have all been huge influences on my thinking over the past three years.

But, since working at the Berkman Center and starting ACMEBoston last fall, I’ve come to admire and appreciate those who work to capture and communicate the ideas, hopes, dreams, and aspirations of others. Media are powerful. Being part of the process can be like nothing else.

Being part of a process that helps communicate ideas–personal or those of others–through words, images, sound, and video over the Internet (the openness we enjoy now, while we still have it) is amazing. These ideas distributed through global media channels shape what we may think and lead to decisions that change lives.

But, with this delivery comes a massive responsibility in whatever medium not just the web. Many of which lie in fundamental principles of journalism: truth, accuracy, accountabilty, fairness, and trust. Sharing the ideas of others–and personal ideas, because the concept of objectivity seems up for grabs to me–is essential to keeping a crazy world somehow connected across religion, language, poltics, ideologies, belief systems, and other “differences” often used against people and entire nations.

I look forward to starting graduate studies in the fall and to my recent shift from theory to production. There’s theory in production and beauty in both.

I’m going to blog my grad school education: my classes, teachers, papers, projects, and other experiences over the next two years. During this time, I look forward to discovering others blogging about their education at whatever level they’re at, wherever they are in the world.