Webisodes And Their Meaning For Modern Scholarship

I've been thinking a lot today about the relationship between webisodes and modern scholarship. See, to my way of thinking, most modern scholarship has been irrevocably crippled by an unshakable sense of displacement. Academia, for better or worse, necessitates a certain degree of intellectual distance from its subject matter. For the most part, everything we study, whether it be in math, science, or history, consists of long-held theories or suppositions that have been mulled over and substantiated many times over. Whenever a new hypothesis does arise, it is rarely allowed to permeate the insular world of academia. There is precious little room in scholarship for the new or the revolutionary.

But the makeup of educational institutions is quickly changing, and scholarship must keep up. The students of today “think nonlinearly and learn through lurking, discovering, experimenting, and experiencing. They consider it entirely acceptable to go straight to a source as the social boundaries between producer and consumer blur." This quote comes from an article in the USC Trojan Family Magazine titled Requiem For A Term Paper. It was written by Eric Mankin and it says a lot of interesting things about the place of scholarship in our modern world.

Part of what Mankin goes on to point out in his article is the fact that the distance between scholar and subject has indeed lessened, creating an academic environment in which projects must explore their topics from a more immediate vantage point. My project seeks to reflect this change by exploring the emerging art form of webisodes—serialized modes of web-based storytelling that have begun to suffuse our culture and the ways in which we relate to it—even as this format continues to evolve and seek out its place in society. That's what made "The Reunion" so fun and exhilarating for me; I wasn't working in a format that had already been perfected, I was working in a format that was still very much finding its way.