This week we continued to work on ‘project 4’ – in our groups, discussing what we had achieved over the previous week and what needed to be done now that our annotated bibliographies were complete.
To gain a better understanding of how we wanted to approach the task, we each described and discussed the articles we had discovered during the completion of the annotated bibliography task. This was very helpful as Jeremy, Cheyenne and myself had each focused on different areas of our topic, allowing for a broad overview of a variety of different mediums and theories of media. We also confirmed an idea we had workshopped in an earlier meeting, that being to focus on ‘Conflict’ and how it is represented and discussed by a range of mediums. I think this approach will enable us to investigate a lot of interesting areas and find connections between a range of different mediums.
With this newfound information and direction, we started to discuss new ways to develop and present our research, deciding upon the format of a website. This somewhat interactive medium would allow us to present information in a range of different forms, which for our topic (mediums), I believe is especially important. Being able to combine our independent research into short videos, articles, graphics and more will foster a diverse ‘web-environment’, and hopefully we will be able to create an engaging presentation within this platform. We each decided to select an area of focus which we would investigate and link to other ideas and areas. I will be looking into interactive mediums (specifically video games), Jeremy will be investigating propaganda and Cheyenne will be exploring the News Broadcast medium.
After confirming with Robbie that we were on the right track (which thankfully we were), he recommended that we also investigate the interactions and combinations between our chosen areas of focus. This gave me the idea to look into controversial/propaganda video game products, such as the Neo-Nazi produced game ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ and the US government’s recruitment game, ‘America’s Army’. Considering the relationships between our different mediums will certainly enrich our final product, and give a fuller picture of ‘mediums’.
In the last part of the class, we listened to the ideas of the other groups in the class, this was really useful as it helped me further understand the ‘broader’ concepts of this task. It also gave me a few additional ideas to consider in our study of mediums – for instance, I will now look into social media platforms and community websites in my research of interactive mediums.
Now for this post’s video. Today I’ll share an interesting episode of a web-series titled ‘Extra Credits’. In this episode, the area of video games and controversy is explored. The ideas discussed are very relevant to my/our investigation of different mediums (and interactive media). I also like how the information is presented and would like to create a few short videos in this style as part of our assignment. I think it allows for both an informative AND entertaining/engaging video presentation.