Getting the ball rolling

....but, the question is, in which direction??

In going over the requisite learning syllabus last Friday, our first piece of assessment (in the creation of a Community theme-based documentary) shall be a Learning Contract (to be published in yep, you guessed it, none other than this very blog!). After we had introduced ourselves, me being the Honours black sheep, we discussed some of the specific communities we belonged to, and also how/why we considered ourselves to be part of them.

The first one that sprung to mind was obvious: The RMIT Community. In the institution of Higher Learning, we - both students and staff - are distinct from our tertiary counterparts at Melbourne Uni, Monash, La Trobe, Deakin or Vic Uni. Though we have a separate TAFE division, much of our cultural heritage is rooted in the slogan 'The working man's college' - which I believe still carries forth throughout many of our degree programs, at least in the Media & Communications stream (as compared with other universities, our emphasis on the practical as well as the theoretical aspects of learning is thought to be significantly greater). Our cultural makeup is diverse and rich, with many of our students (and indeed, a number of the students enrolled in the Masters stream) here to study from abroad.

Several other communities were also brought up: shires, regions of Melbourne (i.e. North, South, East, West or inner/CBD), sporting club memberships, religious groups, mothers clubs, work groups, gym memberships, charities, volunteer groups, ethnic congregations - etc.

The ones I could come up with for myself were:
The Cinema Nova members' community
The Palace Cinemas members' community
The Aussie Farmers Direct staff community
The Jonathan Cainer Internet members' community
The astro.com subscribers' community (and forum)
and to some extent, the live music/hospitality community (I have my security licence - have worked at numerous live venues such as The Espy, The Hifi, The Corner and The Palace).

I have included some of my online memberships because I consider them to be pretty integral to my developed sense of community. I've been a member of several music and band forums in my time, as well as many Australian discussion forums. My interactions with other members on these sites have been nothing but valuable, as it is not always in real life that we can have all the sorts of discussions we'd like with other like-minded individuals! For the more specialised areas of interest, the internet is a very good vehicle for generating discussion and debate among individuals who are not confined to the same space - but rather, are scattered across the globe. And there is nothing more stimulating in the context of intellectual conversation, than the poly-sided views of other people, whose living arrangements and upbringings are at times radically different from my own.

In discussing the purpose of documentary last week, Jenny identified the genre as one that addresses the world in which we live. That is, it offers a tangible representation of the aspects of the world we inhabit and share, in a distinctive sort of way. The fascinating thing about the increased number of cyber and game-based communities is that they are a) increasingly prevalent among the younger generation, and b) experienced in an increasingly subjective manner. Still, sufficient attention must be paid to their many manifestations, as their proliferation can only offer some extraordinarily valuable insight on present-day appropriations of notional 'communities'. In preparation for this week's class, I'll be doing some more thought in regards to this and what possible avenues I could take to explore these ideas.