Journey to Digital Communication
Why the Major:
When it comes to communication, some people are naturally great at it, whereas others may not be. I decided to pursue my degree in Communication Studies not because I thought it would be easy, but more of a challenge that I wanted to accomplish.
I grew up in a household where communication was a subject that everyone avoided, and the older I got, the more I knew I didn’t want to repeat that cycle.
The description of Communication Studies caught my attention as I was exploring the Grand Rapids Community College programs. The degree helps prepare students with “strong communications skills, including the ability to actively listen, work collaboratively in teams, problem solve, manage conflict, demonstrate strong verbal and nonverbal communication skills and show the ability to identify and adapt to diverse perspectives.”
However, what really stood out to me was the first sentence that the program said, “Effective communication is the lifeblood to building and maintaining successful personal and professional relationships.”
It stood out to me because what that statement said was so right. I did not have that effective communication to build and maintain personal relationships during that time.
Why the Minor:
Approaching my final years at Grand Valley State University, I was still missing enough credits where a minor would be fulfilled to graduate. After discussing it with a friend, she brought up the minor Digital Studies and told me that it might pair well with our Communication Studies major.
After researching what the minor necessitates, I discovered the two goals that the program had; the first goal “is to teach students the skills necessary to use digital skills and tools foundational to their careers, including data literacy, visualization, multimedia production, visual rhetoric, and design.”
Throughout my academic career, I never got the chance to take any classes that involved digital skills. Still, it was always intriguing to me, especially when it came to graphic design or anything involving digital tools. More than often, I would find myself asking, “how did they do that?” I would never actually find the answer to the question, though. As someone who always had an interest in having digital skills, this minor was looking like something that I would really enjoy and benefit from.
The second goal of the program “is to gain the knowledge to critically assess digital culture, including the interrogation of social media, digital identity and representation, and exploring the ethical implications of digital access.” The second goal of the program that gave me the push to decide that I wanted to claim this as my minor as it would push me to think more critically than learning the practical digital skills.
Putting the two together:
As I started taking some Digital Studies courses at Grand Valley, I have learned that the Digital Studies minor and my Communication Studies major complimented each other very well.
A course that I took last year for a major was COM 320 Vision and Culture, where this class really helped me understand how to incorporate visuals with DS 202 Digital Data and Design.
An assigned reading for COM 320, “Seeing is Believing: An Introduction to Visual Communication,” written by Arthur Berger, talks about twelve fundamental elements found in visual communication. One of the elements is called colors in which is “a rather complex and bewildering phenomenon. Studies by psychologists have revealed that color affects our emotions and feelings and can be used to shape people’s behavior.”
Another fundamental element was direction, where it is used to direct “our eyes to move in a direction” and to “look at different parts of it and read all kinds of different meanings into it” (Gombrich, Ernst Hans Josef). I carried this knowledge to DS 202 for the third project, where I was required to make an infographic. I purposely made the layout from top to bottom, making the reader’s eyes go from left to right as the demographic were elementary students. As the topic was Deforestation, I had the color scheme in a specific order starting with yellow to symbolize warning to indicate that action needs to be taken and ending it with blue at the bottom to signify calm to suggest solutions.
Looking more deeply into Digital Studies and the future:
This minor has helped me with practical digital skills like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign, as the first goal has been mentioned. However, it has also made me realize how digitally illiterate and unaware I am of the subject.
As I continued to take DS courses, it has helped me find a profound understanding of what this minor is in a conceptional way, like the second goal stated.
In DS 202, I went into the class not knowing much about the course, but when an assignment was given connecting it to Giorgia Lupi, my data admiration spiked. Lupi is known as an advocate for Data Humanism. She takes recorded data to the next level by adding a meaningful layer to numbers by including both a co-dependent relationship between observation and experience to become a humanistic approach. By the end of the semester, I was able to create data that had a narrative. I learned that storytelling plays a significant role in data as it’s a way to communicate in an engaging way that can influence, teach, and inspire the audience.
A couple courses that I took, DS 350 Social Media in Culture and SOC 366 American Society and Media, made me aware of the issues within technology. Topics of Algorithms, Surveillance, Diversities, and Biases have arisen, all of which are topics that can intersect that I wasn’t even consciously aware until taking the courses. It has made me a lot more attentive to my engagement with social media as there is a lot more behind the scenes than one would think.
As I am about to graduate, I look forward to implementing and utilizing the skills that I have learned and am currently learning from the DS courses for my professional life and my personal life.
I used a quote from the GRCC website at the beginning, “Effective communication is the lifeblood to building and maintaining successful personal and professional relationships.” As I read it now, I can’t help but think of how this quote fits perfectly for Digital Studies. Technology will only continue to advance, and I can’t imagine myself or others not having the knowledge I have now because I know that there will always be a need to continue to learn and stay up to date with anything involving technology.
“Chapter 2.” Seeing Is Believing: an Introduction to Visual Communication, by Arthur Asa Berger, Mayfield, 1998, pp. 34.
Gombrich, Ernst Hans Josef. The Image & the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Phaidon, 2002.
