It is appropriate that my final assignment of my undergraduate career at UMass is a post about comment culture. My whole degree is about communication of one form or another.
The first assignment, letters to the editor, was certainly a high point, as the letter I wrote was about something I cared about, and it was published. I really feel I added to the conversation because I addressed a topic of broad interest to the readers of the Recorder. Hopefully, I convinced a few readers (besides myself) to shovel out their fire hydrant or storm drain. I think that it is interesting that I started the class with old-school, one-way conversation using a newspaper. These day, of course, even newspaper content is almost always interactive, where people post comments on all stories and letters to the editor. But the Greenfield Recorder, like many small regional newspapers, limits the content that they put on line in an effort to not give away too much content for free. One of the things they don’t have on their website is their letters section, so I didn’t have an opportunity to interact with other readers. I just put it out there and hoped people read it and took action.
