Benjamin Dunst
My name is Benjamin Dunst, and I am a graduating Media and Communications student with a concentration in Public Relations. I studied my first semester at the University of Stirling in Scotland for four months. In my free time, I enjoy watching and playing sports, and spending time with my (large!) family. I am excited about the timing of my graduation, as my mother and I are graduating at the same time (though her’s comes with a PhD.)
I wanted to write about something I had never written much bout before. Consider myself a writer first and foremost, and have always liked to work with words. I have been politically active and politically-minded for a very long time and wanted to bring my awareness of the events happening in that world together with the world of social media and entertainment. The reason for this is because I believe those forces of entertainment have become increasingly more powerful and influential throughout my lifetime, and the channels by which we consume cital information, news, and opinions is changing drastically. I thought of this as a real challenge, and I did find it to be quite challenging.
The project is called Convergence, due to the now-defining interaction between both sides of the equation. It was also important to me that the nature of the articles isn’t so much about specific political beliefs. If it were, then those who agree with my individual opinions would believe it, and those who don’t would not. Instead, I wanted to look at individual events as signifiers of greater happenings and phenomena occurring throughout the world. Taking a specific event and really looking at the mechanisms and workings of them is the challenge of the project, and I enjoyed doing it quite a bit. Only once everything was completed was I able to take a step back and make conclusions about what was written. That was the joy of the project – letting it take on a story of its own.
Additionally, it was important to me that I collect the writings of others in order to add diversity of perspective to the project. This is evident in the topics covered and the different voices that emerge from them. This was partially to protect the project from being overwhelmed with my voice and opinions, and also to ensure some topics were covered by someone closer to the topic. Overall, I think Convergence really turned out well, and I hope that it’s equal parts entertaining and politically informative. (See what I did there?)