The First Tentative Steps into Blog-World.

The intention for this blog is to sketch out my ideas concerning the cinema, combining my academic research and personal thoughts. I have been studying part time for an Msc in Film Studies at the University of Edinburgh for 16 months now and I only now feel like I'm starting to think like an academic - though I could be wrong about that too. Beginning a blog is something I probably should have done ages ago, I love communicating and I talk a lot, as my friends and family will testify to! I have been wary of getting my academics pursuits out in the open though and have kept them safely within the boundaries of essay writing and discussions with my fellow students. Now is the time to fully embrace online publication and be brave in this new decade, to move on (but not away from) writing with my Imperial typewriter.

This week I have read the last chapter of Cinema 1 by Gilles Deleuze and the first chapter of Cinema 2. I continued to read After Photography by Fred Ritchin and I began reading An Introduction to Metaphysics by Henri Bergson. My reading on the side is Swans Way, the first book in Marcel Proust's six volume novel, In Search of Lost Time.

Recently my interests have been moving toward issues of analog versus digital photography and film, hence my picking up Ritchin's book which is an accessible discussion of the implications, both positive and negative, of the so called 'digital revolution'. Starting this blog makes me feel a greater acceptance of the positive side of digital developments! Ritchin picks up where Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag began in addressing the way photography has transformed the way we think about the world and how we conceive of ourselves and our lives. We have moved far passed the issue of image manipulation that began with the act of posing for the portraitist, manipulating our expression and posture for that best version of ourselves. What we have now are hundreds of different versions of our image available to view through social networking sites so that we don't need that one perfect shot, we can always upload another photograph, maybe a different pose or the same one repeated on every night out in the pub. We interact with images now, click on one and it leads you to another in a simple gesture demonstrative of the way technology develops endlessly towards convenience.

Images on the internet are like any information that's available to view, just like this blog which is another form of communication. The difference that Ritchin talks about is that we have come to expect information from the source, rather than to request it. Information is a basic right, now that so much is easily available online. This is one thing that bothers me about Facebook, that I may have 'friends' whom I don't ever interact with but I am able to view their activity and see images of them carrying on with their lives, without having to ask, "How are you?"
This is all carried out through our computers of course, we look at the screen and search for what we want, look at images and videos and have online conversations. We have an identity in the online world, conceived of through factual data; age, gender, date of birth, and through our projection of our personalities in the choices we make and personal information we put 'out there' on the web.

I checked out Henri Bergson on the advice of one of my professors, as Gilles Deleuze had based his writing on Bergsons' theories. An Introduction to Metaphysics is a fairly intimidating title but having read some Deleuze, and in thinking about issues of perception and identity, I could almost get to grips with what Bergson was saying. How do we conceive of ourselves? That is the important question here, and I feel my concerns may be, how does the cinema conceive of us? How do we conceive of ourselves through the cinema and the various other screens we interact with?
'There is one reality, at least, which we all seize from within, by intuition and not by simple analysis. It is our own personality in its flowing through time - our self which endures. We may sympathise intellectually with nothing else, but we certainly sympathise with our own selves.'
-Bergson (8).

I'm going to have to leave these questions hanging here. In terms of our online selves and the one reality that we can truely know, Bergson would consider the internet to be a secondary, imperfect perspective, as it digests information and reduces it through analysis, 'we are not dealing with real parts, but with mere notes of the total impression.' (24)

I hope that through this blog, my writing and my ideas improve and develop, and I appreciate any constructive criticism readers may have to offer. At the moment I'm aware of my naivety in the face of new research and discoveries!