Month: May 2016

Swot analysis.

Before undertaking a collaboration, it is reasonable to undertake an honest assessment of your own abilities, so that you can form an appropriate team, and negotiate appropriate roles and responsibilities.

SWOT analysis stands for Strengths; Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.

Strengths
In regards to the project you need to complete, what are your strengths?

• Creativity

• Writing

• Composition

• Most fulfilled when working with people

Weaknesses
In regards to the project you need to complete, what are your weaknesses?

• Procrastination

• Time management

• Working in a rigidly structured way

Opportunities
In regards to the project you need to complete, what do you perceive is of particular interest, or presents an opportunity to extend your knowledge in a way that interests you?

• Looking at restructuring what a video essay is, and exploring ways of presenting information in a new, unconventional and exciting way.

• Excited to work collaboratively on a film project (easier, more conducive to a group environment / dynamic than projects such as group essays).

Threats
In terms of your own personal situation, what risks do you identify which impede the completion of the project?

• Having two other group projects, as well as other assignments on at the same time.

• Involvement in college events.

• Conflicting schedules / limited availability of group (as we’re all equally busy).

Outcome
As a result of performing the SWOT analysis, consider as a team how you will manage the range of skills available in the group.

• Reviewing each other’s SWOT analyses, as a team we will work well as we all bring individualised strengths to the table, which we can employ to support and improve upon each other’s weaknesses to create a project that is cohesive, well rounded and highlights and plays to our individual talents.

Week 9 tutorial in review.

In this week’s tutorial, we workshopped project brief 4, as, because of its broad scope many people, our group included, have been left a little bewildered by the assignment.

We simply went through what should be done for the project, and how best to go about it.

As our group has completed the group contract, ours was used as an example, as we fleshed out the assignment and narrowed down the focus of our topic of discussion, reframing it into a question: How have changing technologies effected the distribution and reception of news broadcasting? 

News reception in the new age.

From here, we can begin to build an argument. We expect to create such a contention by using our readings from the annotated bibliographies as a starting point, and each of us are working on posting the annotated bibliographies and pulling out important extracts to share with the group at the moment.

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Following a discussion of the annotated bibliographies, we looked at creating the video essay itself.

Here, we watched a variety of examples and explored the differing ways that we can go about creating the essay. We watched Why CD Sucks (Except It Doesn’t); a fast-paced, dialogue packed video essay, followed by a student example, with little to no dialogue. Looking into it further, I found How To Do Visual Comedy, which strikes a balance between these two styles, and then found Wes Anderson: A Mini Documentary, which, unlike the others, featured very few clips from the films discussed, but rather incorporated stills and hand-drawn stop-motion animation in order to illustrate its discussion – a technique a very much enjoyed.

Although we didn’t discuss the audio essay in great detail, I think it would be nice to do ours in the style of a BBC radio documentary, focussing on a specific example of how changing media technologies have effected the representation of a specific area / event, using found sound news footage to add drama and ambience to the story. The video essay will focus more broadly on a similar topic.

The rest of this week will be spent on the annotated bibliography readings, pulling out information that will form the basis of our video and audio essays.

Fandom & Copyright

 

Privacy and advertising in a post-broadcast era.

In today’s lecture, the audience in the post-broadcast era was spoken about. One of the largest implications of the post-broadcast era, wherein entertainment becomes more individualised, widely and constantly accessible, can be found in advertising. One of the largest developments in recent years has been the ability to directly address your target audience through web advertising. Be this through product placement or Facebook advertising, due to the demographics collected almost everywhere on the web (age, gender, country), in combination with the niche viewing audiences created by the diversification of the media terrain, advertising is more directed than ever. And although this means that advertising is more successful and therefore more profitable than ever, it also raises a few questions:

• Is the collection of private information and search history for marketing purposes ethical, or an invasion of privacy?
• While showing consumers advertising that is more relevant to them, as paid for by companies, actual content is forgone – is it okay to dictate what content people see?
• Should there be a way for consumers to opt out of things such as Facebook advertising or, as a free interface, should this be taken as the ‘price’ for the service?
• Should further restraints be placed on offline data collection?
• Should consumers be able to put constraints on precisely what data is shared in market targeting?
• Does the collection of our personal information actually effect us? Could it be used maliciously?

While the media industry is becoming a more diverse and interactive medium, the lines between what is acceptable and unacceptable for consumer/producer relations is becoming more and more blurred. However, with advertising platforms like Facebook, a ubiquitous and often necessary service, autonomy from marketing and data collection is increasingly more difficult to control or even avoid.

Group Project Brainstorm 

Group project meeting 1.

Today our group for PB4 met up to brainstorm, and work out exactly what we were going to do for our assignment. Through a soft-drink fuelled discussion, we finally settled on looking at news media, and how the evolution of media technologies has impacted the way that news is spread. This leads into further discussions of bias, orientalism, propaganda, social action, etc, which we will narrow down our focus on in our research throughout the week.

Overall it was quite a good discussion, and we were able to tell each other if a particular idea wasn’t good without any tension, often using the idea as a springboard to work out further ideas, which is really important for effective group work, as group dynamic ultimately dictates a project’s outcome in many ways.