Jason Jonathan Joseph – an autobiography

I am a character, to say the least, a character in the story that is my life. Ever since my little hands were dexterous enough to grip and pull things apart, that is what I have done. And pretty soon my brain followed suite and thought overtime about how things work and why they work the way they did.

On my seventh or eighth Christmas I received a remote controlled car, I remember. The car did not stay in tact for too long though. By the time the sun was casting a warm amber glow on the earth I was sitting with all the various pieces of my gift carefully placed around me. I sought the person who was in my car and driving it when I pushed on the lever on my remote control.

Then I started discovering worlds in other worlds in other worlds that exist in books. My mind sought the stories behind the stories I read. Whenever I finished a book I kept wondering what ever did happened to the whole world of people I had met and discovered. I started creating stories for them outside the text. Eventually the stories got too much for my head alone to contain and I started writing them down.

There was also this insidious curiosity that gnawed at my grandmother’s memories that would hopefully enlighten me about who, what exactly I was and where I originated frim. Then my curiosity of myself and especially of others’ etymology started to bud. I would want to know everything I could possibly know about others to better understand them and, I realise now with age and wisdom, to understand myself too. I really am because we are. And sharing what I have learnt about you, from you and others around you with you and others also brings me joy.

When I hit my teen-years and my pop-culture fixation bloomed I became obsessed with trying to understand what makes famous persons and personalities who have impacted my life tick. What is it inside of them that made me relate to them on this merely mediated interaction through music, magazines and television?

Soon I found a new playground, the biggest playground I could ever imagine: the internet. I could spend hours just whiling time away searching for picture and exciting new bits of information about all my favourite personalities. Then to my delight I was introduced to the sandbox that was MySpace, and as if that was not enough I found the jungle-gym of Facebook. Now if I met someone new and really wanted know what made them tick I would scour their profiles on MySpace, Facebook and now the little playroom of Twitter too! It amazes me what people reveal about them so unknowingly by what they say in the big playground of the World Wide Web, and what social masks they choose to wear on the playground. What people choose to share on their profiles sometimes tells you so much more than what they often say to you face to face interaction.

Anyway, Curious soul that I am, I cannot ever just leave any old magazine alone without at least paging through it and perusing the pictures and headlines. One day I picked up a Glamour Magazine and encounter a Gwen Stefani article. Now you see, Gwen Stefani is one of my most favourite artists. I just ravished that article and read it from start to finish. Truly I do not believe I have ever been that excited for a piece of writing before. A new, different, deeper excavation into the life of one of the personalities I have a deep (mediated) intimacy with. That article and the joy I felt in reading it and gaining another gem into the life of one of my favourite personalities stays with me and glints in my mind’s treasure chest when I think of articles that appear in glossy paged magazines.

One day when I excavated from the World Wide Playground’s mines a diamond that was the Rolling Stones Magazine’s 8 page feature article on Lady Gaga (another of my most favourite artists and personalities) I knew what I wanted to do with my life. The excitement I got from increasing the (mediated) intimacy I felt with another of my favourite artists brought me great joy. And I starting thinking to myself I would like others to feel the excitement and joy I felt by learning more and delving deeper into the ordinary person and well-known personality’s life. That was when I realised I wanted to be a writer, a teller of people’s stories, a keeper of the treasure that is people’s interesting experiences, because everyone actually does have an interesting story.

It came to me that I not only like spelunking deeper into the lives and life-stories of glittering (famous) personalities, but also of the person walking down the corridor. The thing is that you don’t only find greatness on the world’s stages, sometimes there are diamonds who are waiting to shine by having their stories made to glisten as they walk by you in the corridors.

Eventually I want to write for those glossy publications like the Rolling Stones, Glamour and the sort, but first I want to know the stories and histories that make the diamond I walk by in the corridors everyday shine. I want to write and tell people’s stories, and everyone has a story, it is all about buffering through all the dust until you get to the lustre of it.

The best ways to share people’s stories, and know a person, is to ‘show not tell’. This has been illustrated to me on MySpace, Facebook, and also the slightly more conventional method of reading feature articles in a Glamour-, or Rolling Stones Magazine. I believe that the three specialisations I have chosen could burgeon in me the necessary skills to be able to find out and share people’s treasures of experience.

The Writing and Editing specialisation course will help me in the most obvious way by improving my story telling skills when it comes to the world of print. I am also hoping that writing will help distil my story-telling skills to ensure I keep my audience captivated and coming back for more.

The Television specialisation course could hopefully instil in me the ability to show and not tell in the visual medium, which course prove more of a challenge than merely painting a picture with one’s word.
I have always believed that a picture speaks a thousand words; the Photojournalism course I believe could give me the lexicon photos speak in order to use those thousand words to tell a most beautiful and interesting stories.

I believe I have a raw talent in finding and telling stories. I wish to develop that and make it the best it can be under the guidance of the Rhodes School of Journalism and Media Studies. To be able to live my dream of being able find the treasure and share the treasure that lies in people’s lives and experiences would bring me great joy. After all, the Persian origin of my name is ‘Keeper of the treasure’.