Media Specificity

Lord Voldemort takes Pinterest.

https://www.pinterest.com/lord_v/

I had a lot of fun with this assignment. At the beginning I was rather nervous because it seemed so dauntingly difficult, but as I started thinking and talking about it I got excited. Initially, I wanted to make an Instagram account for You-Know-Who, but I started to realized that taking and finding pictures of everything in Voldemort's world wouldn't really help me learn anything new. I decided to make a Pinterest account instead because Pinterest is the medium I use least intentionally. When I am on Pinterest I don't worry about what people will think or what I am saying about myself, I just pin. It was really interesting to pin with a specific intention. I knew how I wanted to portray Voldemort and I just sought to do that. I would say that my Voldemort account pokes fun at Pinterest. I created the standard boards and used them to make a point about a character. The process really made me think about the messages we send through Pinterest and how we portray ourselves there, even though we usually use Pinterest very casually.

I think that this media specificity could be very effective as a character analysis assignment. It helps students to make choices that demonstrate their understanding of a character, but it also helps them to consider the character in a different situation. I think to make the assignment more text based I would include a written piece that justified their choices with evidence from the text. I think that this assignment would be particularly useful for texts that are rich in character development.