Résumé
Admittedly, I didn’t choose this course based on its topic, but rather because the timing seemed the most convenient — although I’m still quite useless at 8 am — and, if given the chance, I tend to stick with lecturers that I already know. Even though that’s not the wisest approach when you think of university as a place where you’re given the opportunity to learn about the things that interest you the most, it did work out in my favour this time. This turned out to be one of the most informative courses I’ve taken so far, and I feel like the topic couldn’t be any more appropriate and important than it is right now.
For one, the course requirements actually required you to do something, which was refreshing. The blogging task was very suitable for a course that’s based largely on political discussion. And after all, political change can only occur when people are willing to engage in political debate and speak up for what they believe in. So the blogging wasn’t just a petty requirement to gain some ECTS points, but also useful on a larger scale.
I still had my reservations about the blogging task because I feel rather uncomfortable participating in (political) discussions. It’s just not something that comes naturally to me, and it’s all the more daunting when said political opinion has to be expressed on the Internet, where in can be accessed by a potentially unlimited audience. Hence the pseudonym. Although I somehow managed to shy away from overly political topics until the very end, I do feel more relaxed about the blog posts now than I did at the beginning of the semester, so I’m counting it as a success.
I don’t think I learned too much new concrete information, because I was already fairly critical of the news media to begin with, but it was still an informative course. At the beginning of the semester, I wasn’t really aware of the scope of the fake news phenomenon and wasn’t familiar with many foreign TV news formats. Also, I was a bit surprised that, based on our conversations in class, so many people use social media websites as their primary source for reading the news, since I’ve personally never (intentionally) used them for that purpose. Besides that, it was a welcome change to the usual curriculum of literature and culture to talk about something that’s more relevant to daily life.
