Reflex action

This last term of my first year was possibly the busiest one out of the whole year. The amount of work exceeded far beyond that of the first term despite having to work with in a genre. That is that not only did I feel the pressure of managing to get all my work in ion time I had to make sure that it fitted with in the expectations of the genre of my blog, however I feel that in some way we were also confined to a type of genre in the first term, that is the genre of the newspaper which is a lot more constrained to grammar and formalities.

Despite that the genre of a blog allows one to be more personal and less specific, I was not as productive as I would of thought I would have been. The fact that the genre of the blog is relaxed should have encouraged me to write more, but because of the work load and this includes more than, as well as, deadlines for journalism, I found that I did not always have enough time to do extra work. I am sure that everyone will agree with me that one cannot work 24 hours a day, that is one need to maintain a balance in their life between work and me time or otherwise known as play. Other than that, nothing else seemed to hold me back.

The imagined audience was of very little concern to me because in first term we had to use a similar tactic, except that there was no potential for our stories to be read outside of the class room, that is by a global audience. Yet when it came to writing the stories the imagined and potential audience became important.

That is that I needed to meet the expectations and ideals of the audience as well as that of my blog character. This meant that all the stories I wrote where determined by the audience, so that the tone and what I said and put into my stories would be easily relatable to them. I did not find this restrictive though, as it requires a certain fare of creativity to be able to meet the demands of an audience without boring them with clichéd stories.

Having meetings concerning our blogs with members in the group and the tutor also helped produce creative stories, that was not clichéd. Thankfully my group did not experience any problems with each other and we worked well together. This meant that we were able to make decisions quickly and with little fuss and were able to sort out any last minute problems out in a matter of seconds.

Working in groups perhaps was the best way to learn some important real life people skills. Thus professionally, growth happened within the paradigm of group work. However I feel that no personal growth can happen within this paradigm other than learning or trying to master patience and rationality.

Working in groups also played a part in confining me to the genre of a blog, although as I mentioned before that since the genre is more relaxed I did not feel as restricted. But the question remains, does blogging equal up to the same as journalism.
Fundamentally, both are concerned with writing about events, but what those events differ on a continuous scale. Some might say that blogging is just commentary on what the newspapers have already commented on. Yet I believe that perhaps blogging could be the start of journalism or a hybrid of free range journalism. That is it is not constrained to the professionalism experience within the journalism world.

Somehow I experienced this constraint, but in a different form. That is I had to write within the theme of Surviving First Year. I had to keep in mind that I could not just merely comment on what others had to say, but I also had to give my own opinion within that theme, since future students need a firsthand experience more than a know it all comment.

The genre of the blog allowed me that bit more freedom to experiment with the production of my opinion because I was not restricted by the professional limitations of the newspaper genre. Yet unlike any ethical concerns I might have experienced in the first term, I did not experience any ethical problems with the blog. Perhaps this was because I did not deal with anything extremely controversial, but this does not mean that a blog does not have the potential to be controversial. Quiet on the contrary, since a blog is about opinion that is not constrained by any laws or professionalism, it therefore has more potential to go against the grain than what any news story would.