Today we worked on our project some more. In our group we worked together to go through all the work we’ve accomplished so far and collate it onto our site. It’s coming together rather nicely so far, all of the images and text are up but the videos of the interview, Rupert Murdoch, and my video essay are still to be completed and will be posted later in the week.
The site is really coming together, and even though when we first set out we imagined creating a clear platform dividing both traditional and new media in two, it seems as we progress through our tasks and we develop our ideas more, through this website based collaboration, that the two forms are blurring into one, as traditional media institutions aim to produce more viral and entertaining content and modern media institutions aim to produce more factual and credible content, effectively evening each other out and reaching an equilibrium.
We also created ‘learning graphs’, graphs which objectively assess how much we think we’ve progressed in our first semester. Basically, I just drew a bunch of squiggly lines heading up, because this whole semester has just been a crazily amazing learning curve, and I’ve loved every second of absorbing it all.
On Monday we got together during our regular class time (since Robbie wasn’t there) and worked together to create a video filtering a speech presented by Rupert Murdoch. Jess transcribed the speech so that we could work together to pick apart what he said and twist it into unique and hilarious sentences that all somehow worked to create a love letter from Murdoch to his institutions. Although we found it progressively difficult at times to edit the audio, it is always interesting to find ways in which to overcome such obstacles.
I also worked more on the biographies which will focus on seven institutions spanning both traditional mediums, such as print and television news media, and blogging/social media. These institutions which I am focusing on and which have a great deal of influence within Australia are: The Age, Herald Sun, Channel ten, SBS, BuzzFeed, Humans of New York and the YouTube channel; the VlogBrothers. These biographies will feature on our multi-media platform and will act as a way of showing our visitors the ways in which such institutions can influence the way in which we access information.
We also interviewed Philip Dearman, asking him a range of questions:
What do you think is the biggest difference between traditional and new media?
How do you think the evolution of new media has affected traditional media e.g. journalism?
How do you think journalism has evolved in recent times?
What kind of effect do you think media ownership has on the material produced in journalism?
What do you think is the role of politics in sources? For example, newspapers and other traditional media using only government officials as sources.
Could you talk about the (potential) difference in ethics between traditional and modern media institutions? e.g. traditional media institutions are run for profit, whereas some modern media institutions are not.
It was very interesting hearing from the head of journalism at RMIT and seeing what his perspective on the issues we presented were.
I hope to find information on the comparison of different ways in which news is presented on TV, such as discussion based, like Q and A and the Project, Current Affairs, such as A Current Affair and Today Tonight, and Regular Nightly News, such as SBS World News and Channel 9 news.
I also hope to find another journalist to interview, and hopefully gain another person’s interesting perspective on such interesting issues.
In this weeks lectorial we looked at institutions. Brian Morris told us that in order for anything to be an institution it has to be some kind of structure within society that contains social, cultural, political and economic relations as well as principles, values and rules which underlie these relations. An institution is also material but not tangible. All of these things, and more, Hollywood definitely is.
Recently Hollywood has had a ‘run in’ with the law, as its discrimination against women in the industry comes under scrutiny. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) accused Hollywood of gender discrimination through its “‘systematic failure’ to hire female directors.” According to the ACLU, “Fewer women are working as directors today than two decades ago…women represented only 7 percent of directors on the 250 top-grossing movies last year… 2 percentage points lower than in 1998. A recent study commissioned by the Sundance Institute and Women in Film and conducted by researchers at USC shows women have comprised fewer than 5 percent of directors of top films during the past two decades. But about half of film-school students are female. In its letter to the federal equal employment commission… the ACLU writes: ‘Decades have passed and gender disparities remain as stark as they were in the 1970s.'” (Cohen, 2015). These statistics show how far the entertainment industry still has yet to go in terms of reaching equality.
Case in point, the recent ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’ press tour showed just how ‘genderist’ Hollywood (and in particular gossip magazines) are, as one reporter decided to swap her prepared questions around and ask Mark Ruffalo the questions she was going to ask Scarlett Johansson:
This just shows how gossip magazines and TV shows perpetauate old fashioned, conservative values that preach self criticism, beauty and perfection for women, through only looking at the surface. With ideals such as these being preached throughout Hollywood it’s no wonder that women have actually come out against feminism, as they are criticised for everything to the point where feminism has been given a really bad name. It has become like a sharp stick. But, just because one end of the stick is sharp and pointy, doesn’t mean the rest of the stick is.
In the past couple of years there have been a lot of developments in the way of equality, such as the UN anouncing the ‘He for She’ campaign (heforshe.org, 2015), a campaign designed to foster solidarity for gender equality between both genders, not just women as it has been percieved as only a women’s battle for so many years (hence the word feminist, in a way). Many developments have also occurred in the feminism debate, with many men coming out in support of feminism like Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Gordon-Levitt, 2014) and Joss Whedon (Whedon, 2013), as well as many women coming out against feminism, as evidenced by the creation of the website ‘Women Against Feminism.’
The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film released its report on 2014, titled “It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World.” The study looks at “on-screen representations of female characters in the top 100 grossing films every year. In addition to… chronic underrepresentation [and] the prevalence of gender stereotypes… the study also reported on the lack of ethnic diversity among the same media.” (Cipriani, 2015)
Dr. Martha Lauzen who wrote the report stated. “The chronic under-representation of girls and women reveals a kind of arrested development in the mainstream film industry… Women are not a niche audience and they are no more ‘risky’ as filmmakers than men. It is unfortunate that these beliefs continue to limit the industry’s relevance in today’s marketplace.” (Cipriani, 2015)
In Joss Whedon’s speech about the word feminist and equality at the Make Equality Reality event on November 4th 2013, he puts many of these points into perspective and asks the question – why is feminist such a horrible word?:
(Whedon, 2013)
I personally agree with Whedon; like racism, the fight for equality should be a thing of the past and as the word racist plants a firm line between where we are now and a politically incorrect past, a new word should do the same for gender equality. This is where Whedon poses the idea of the word ‘genderist’ (which apparently already existed on the internet, in particular, urban dictionary), giving the idea that the struggle for equality is behind us. But as Whedon points out at the end of his speech, we will always be fighting. Hopefully, as time goes on and more and more battles are won, we will have to fight less and less.
On Monday we brainstormed more ideas and concepts that we could use for our website, bringing together different threads to create entirely new content.
Alana will be writing an opinion piece on modern media and a timeline to show the evolution of both traditoinal and modern media side by side.
Jess will do a comparison of both traditional media institutions and modern media intitution, looking at how they filter and utilise information from the same topic, e.g. the earthquake in Nepal. Some chose to cover the devastation in Nepal which caused thousands of deaths, while others chose to focus on the trpped climbers, both sending drastically different messages. As well as the idea of the ‘trending news feed’ and the ‘hash tag’ and their recent evolutions.
I will create small biographies on a variety of institutions of varying political bend and form of address, from the Age, to the Humans of New York blog, to Channel 9 news. I will also find archival footage of Rupert Murdoch in order to create a filtered view of him, showing how the media filter everything they produce in order to produce a desired response. Through the edited piece we hope to achieve a different persona and view of Murdoch, creating a different image.
We also came up with a list of questions to ask Philip Dearman, ranging from ethics and ownership issues in traditional media to the evolving landscape of news media itself. It’s shaping up to be a very interesting project.
Today Brian Morris talked to us about institutions.
The term institution is originally from sociology and is concerned with organising structures that make up society. An institution has to have social, cultural, political and economic relations, and principles, values and rules that inform and underpin these relations. An institution is material, but it is not tangible (Morris, 2015), think of Google and how it is both a material company but has now somehow become a verb, as we all frequently say, “just Google it”. This shows how Google has become a cultural and social entity as well as a company, therefore it is an institution.
Another institution is marriage. Brian asked us about how we thought Marriage counted as a social institution, and we all came up with a long list (which I thought warranted a blog post to explore more, which I will upload a little later).
Media institutions are enduring which produces limitations as they have a status quo to uphold, a reputation which doesn’t allow any breathing room for new creations and developments to occur. They also, regulate and structure activities, are ‘collectivist’, develop working practices, employees and people associated are expected to share values as the public is aware of their status, audiences are also created by institutions and their content. Institutions and their public status develops trust between the audience and the institution as the audience understands the general message of the institution. This trust is however being infringed upon quite frequently as of late, with recent developments over the years such as the News of the World phone hacking scandal and the cash for comments scandal on the radio in 1999. (Morris, 2015)
We then split up into groups for an exercise and researched a media institution out of the four: Facebook, Google, NewsCorp and Community Media. My group looked at Google, and we found that Google’s reach over multiple platforms and technologies shows the power such institutions have over pop culture and societal development. Through this activity we also noticed that many of these institutions, through their quest for money and profit, have gained a monopoly over the market, especially NewsCorp in both Australia and England.
Institutions, especially those which are omnipresent within the media, have a great deal of power and influence through their control of services and products within the market place. Through controlling basic mediums and media-related commodities, media institutions are able to shape social discourse.
– Morris, Brian. Week 10 Lectorial. May 12th 2015.
Today we handed in our bibliographies and worked in our groups to develop concepts for our big final project. Now, while I was absent today because I’m currently sick, I was able to contact my group and brainstorm some ideas.
We have created a website called ‘Institution Revolution: Traditional vs Modern Media’. Each group member will be an individual contributor and post various articles, videos, photos etc. to make an interactive platform.
We also came up with some ideas for possible content, such as an interview with someone in the media, or a part of the RMIT faculty who is involved in journalism. Survey people about issues around our topic and post graphs alongside the results. As well as many others. We hope to come up with many more ideas next lesson, in order to really make a move on this project and start developing our content.
Today we were sorted into our groups for our big final project, through the use of a deck of cards. I have to admit ‘pick a card! Any card!’ is much more fun than, ‘1, 2, 3… ok, 1’s over there.’ So now the project has officially begun and we’re working on the topic of media institutions, and the first thing we all thought of was traditional media institutions such as journalism and news media and how the landscape for such mediums has changed since such social mediums such as blogs and vlogs came into being. This gave us the idea for the entire premise of our project: traditional media vs. modern media.
Exploring the idea of traditional media institutions, one key figure immediately came to mind; Rupert Murdoch has a huge monopoly over the print media industry in Australia, England and some parts of the U.S. This case study of sorts led us to the question of ownership, political and economic agendas, and ethics, especially in traditional media, and how this contrasts to modern media institutions.
for the next part of the project, each member has to compile an annotated bibliography of five articles and we decided what areas each member will research. Alana will research social media institutions, I will research traditional media institutions, and Jess will research comparisons between the two forms, as well as a general overview that links all the aspects we brainstormed together. From this we will brainstorm further ideas and concepts to develop our overall project, which will be a multimedia platform, a.k.a, a website involving articles, videos, and any other pieces we can come up with.
