Do you write what you think or do you think what you write?
The question may seem spurious but it came back to me as I was rereading older things that I had written on Medium and elsewhere since 2012. I concluded a master and later enrolled in a PhD in Communication Sciences whilst feeding several blogs, on different platforms, about the diverse things that I studied, researched and published on that Master and on the initial years of my PhD. And, re-reading those texts, I distinctly recalled that strange sensation (does anyone else feel it? really, I’m curious) that ideas became clearer as I wrote them. As if they had not been ‘thought’ yet and were ‘born’ only when they were being written on the white canvas. This happened a lot.
What propelled me to write was most of the times a simple idea or insight about some paper/book I read or the reaction to some tech news with relation to communication and society. But those simple blogish texts did the magic of organising my ideas on sometimes more complex matters than the initial insights that triggered the text. I discovered then that that was my way of writing… and thinking! In a way, we could say that I do not write what I think; I think what I write!
The thing is: I’ve missed those somewhat rambling but in the end thought-organising blog posts. I’ve missed them a lot. And my PhD has suffered from its absence. That’s why I decided to start again a light and non-complex blog about what I read, what I think and what I write on my Communication Sciences PhD. It’s not a journal or an academic output. It’s a repository of personal reflections on the complex issues I shall be studying.
I will call this blog “Media, Platforms and Society”, and it will live here, on Medium. I shall write only about that which surprises or enchants me and only if I have the urge to do so. Always preserving but also addressing the complexities of the issues at stake. I will not write for larger or smaller audiences; I will write to myself. In public. I hope someday I may return to these texts as I just did to those and conclude that I was right to write them.
The theme? Media, platforms and society: its complexities and perplexities. The role of news media in the previous status quo, the role of online platforms in the new still organising status quo and how society is affected by both, the demise of the old and the emergence of the new. I search for a broad view of the issue, but with solid footing on empirical ground.
Hey, ho, let’s go!
