The Comm 350 Kick-Off Post

I promise to keep out of this blog, as it’s for the students of Comm 350 at NYIT to fill with insights, thoughts and observations about the way social media and the topics that come up in class are in playing around campus, in homework or in the world and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes of this experiment. But somebody has to go first, so it might as well be me.

To all of you who are about to engage in this project, I want to plant a seed with you – an esoteric thought about what you’re creating: the great 20th century composer John Cage created an orchestral composition called 4’33″ which consists of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of complete silence. The rustling, coughing, laughing and complaining by the audience become the focus of the experience.

Even though the first performance of 4’33″ was in 1952, the man clearly understood social media: the community and how it reacts can sometimes be real art. In writing, we give people a chance to react and those reactions become the real art of the conversation we’re having here and in class.

So, with that, have some fun with this, remember to post comments, write something you care about and let’s see where this blogging experiment takes us all.