Assessments, Room With a View

RWAV: Individual Interview

I had plenty of ideas for my RWAV individual interview, but had a lot of trouble finding someone who was available and willing to come in and have a chat with me. I have a feeling that I might have set my sights too high, and attempted to get people who were too prominent/busy to waste their time with a student interviewer, but in the end I was happy that RMIT music industry lecturer Catherine Strong agreed to talk to me about music heritage in Melbourne and the soon-to-be-built Contemporary Music Hall of Fame.

Catherine was a wonderfully generous guest. My subject matter was quite broad, but she gave me 25 minutes of conversation that I was able to narrow down through editing into something focused and succinct. I was also happy that my subject matter would suit RRR if I decided to use it for a future on-air show.

I made sure to make use of Terry Gross’s rules for interviewing, and told Catherine that since our conversation was not being broadcast live she was welcome to stop herself and begin an answer again if needed. She ended up taking advantage of this a few times when she misspoke or couldn’t remember the specific example she was reaching for. As a result I had a great selection of well rehearsed (but still natural sounding) snippets of audio that I was able to string together and cut down into the 10 minute final form.

One thing I made note of for next time is that recording in the RMIT edit suites adds a lot of unwanted hum to the audio, because the suites aren’t perfectly soundproofed. I had to run a noise reduction on the final audio, which ended up being OK but ideally I would record crisp audio to begin with and avoid the need to fix it up at all.

Learnings:

  • Be liberal when contacting potential interviewees, as very few will actually be available and willing to speak to you
  • Take advantage of being at RMIT, which is full of experts who could be interviewed
  • If possible, record interviews either at RRR or in the RMIT on-air studio, as a Zoom recorder in the edit suites results in sub-par audio
  • Use Terry Gross’s ground rules to make your interviewee more comfortable
  • Do as much research as possible before the interview, but try not to use written questions and instead have an informed conversation with your interviewee
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Assessments, Networked Media

My Media Use: Essay

By auditing my own online media use for a week, I was able to shed light on my habits and make a significant discovery that could allow my creative practice to take advantage of the internet. For this essay, rather than evaluating my online media use as a whole I have chosen instead to explore that discovery, and extrapolate it forward to some logical extensions relevant to media makers like myself.

Perhaps the most powerful affordance of digital media is that it’s network-ready by default. Since the internet is a digital medium, it’s trivially easy to upload artefacts of sound, video or text to the internet, where they can be hosted and distributed around the world with universal accessibility (Siapera 2012, pp. 3-4). By using hypertext to create links and relationships between such media artefacts, practitioners can open up the powerful new dimension of multi-platform storytelling, where the constraints of old media no longer apply (Alexander & Levine 2008, pp. 41-42). Using such techniques, authors can create experiences that are self-directed by the audience and may not necessarily be consumed in the form or order envisioned by the author (Alexander & Levine 2008, p. 47), but which to the audience feels significantly richer, more autonomous and more immersive as a result.

A current example of media makers using such techniques is the S-Town podcast, which released its entire series of seven episodes during the week I was auditing my online media use. Immediately after the series went live the S-Town Facebook page was updated with photos taken by the producers from locations significant to the story, links to further discussion, and other material that allowed listeners to get a fuller picture of the podcast and its characters. This material was not essential to the story, but for audience members who desired a deeper understanding of its central themes the multi-platform component offered a number of ways for them to remain engaged in the story. In my personal experience, while listening to the podcast I was able to hop over to the S-Town Facebook page, to Wikipedia, reddit and other web-based locations to fill in gaps in my knowledge (particularly around clocks, which form a central symbol in S-Town as the main character is an antiquarian horologist). This altered my experience of the podcast in a major way, particularly when compared to other narrative-documentary podcasts that don’t have such strong web presences. As social media becomes further enmeshed into society, this kind of user-directed engagement with media will only continue to increase (Hinton & Hjorth 2013, pp. 2-3).

S-Town was produced by the team that made Serial, a podcast series that made even heavier use of its web presence and social media platforms to tell the story of Adnan Syed, a teenager convicted of a 1999 murder. When each episode of the podcast was published, the Serial website was updated with supporting material like maps, letters, timelines, and real-life evidence from the case, giving listeners a rich tapestry of material to combine into the complete murder-mystery story. Serial was such a runaway success that it has been called the “most popular podcast in the history of the form” (Carr 2014), with its success attributed to the story’s extensive depth and the quality of its reporting.

I have made tentative use of multi-platform storytelling techniques to support my own media practice in the past, though I am yet to embark on any major storytelling projects of my own. In 2016 I made a three-minute short film about my brother, who has kept a collection of dozens of novelty rubber erasers for 30 years. The film contains a number of close-up shots of individual erasers from his collection, and separate to the short film I uploaded extra photographs of his collection to Flickr and embedded the gallery in my blog, allowing my audience to get a closer look at the subject of my film. This is admittedly a very cursory, surface-level experimentation with multi-platform publishing, but it illustrates how using networked media (and free platforms like Vimeo and Flickr) opens up a powerful ecosystem for media makers like me even on a small scale.

Multi-platform storytelling offers exciting possibilities in a number of other disciplines, too. For example, a tourism and travel brand could combine online media like Google Maps, streaming video, photography and podcasting to create an interconnected series of city guides and walking tours that are self-directed, nonlinear and allow travelers to experience a city in a way that best suits their own interests. A team of journalists could take advantage of some of the advances associated with Web 2.0, such as multiple authors and “microcontent” (Alexander & Levine 2008, p. 42), to collaborate on a story that takes an event or incident and unfolds outwards, forming a single whole with multiple entry/exit points and the ability to update the story indefinitely. Museums could use new media to bring new dimensions to their physical collections. Fiction storytellers could experiment with subjectivity and experience in their narrative projects. Educators could use networked media to allow students to learn at their own direction and at their own pace.

There are, of course, significant risks that must be considered when using online media in creative practice. By weaving a work into the fabric of the internet — such as by using existing publishing platforms, or by allowing the audience to drop in and out of the story and complete their own research — the author necessarily loses some control over the experience of consuming the work. In extreme cases, the question of who can lay proper claim to being the “author” of the work could even be called into question. There is also a risk associated with the fact that stability and longevity depend on internet access and hosting being available and affordable in perpetuity. Many early examples of multi-platform storytelling, cited in academic studies and media guides, are now no longer readily accessible on the web. One important example, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated news series The Crossing, was lost when the newspaper that published it went out of business, and the series (which consisted of 33 articles plus supporting photography and video, all presented in a bespoke online interface) was only saved because the author happened to have the series backed up on a DVD (Lafrance 2015).

But assuming the risks can be adequately mitigated, the potential new avenues of expression and creativity enabled by network-connected, multi-platform storytelling far outweigh the potential risks and disadvantages. As a media practitioner I’m excited by the sheer number of opportunities presented to me by new media, even as those opportunities also seem overwhelming.

 

References

Alexander, B. & Levine, A. (2008), ‘Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre’ in Educause Review, 43(6), pp. 40-56.

Carr, D. (2015), ‘‘Serial,’ Podcasting’s First Breakout Hit, Sets Stage for More’, The New York Times [online], <https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/business/media/serial-podcastings-first-breakout-hit-sets-stage-for-more.html>, [accessed 9 April 2017]

Hinton, S. & Hjorth, L. (2013), Understanding Social Media, London: SAGE Publications.

Lafrance, A. (2015), ‘Raiders of the Lost Web’, The Atlantic [online], <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/raiders-of-the-lost-web/409210/> [accessed 9 April 2017]

Siapera, E. (2012), Understanding New Media, London: SAGE Publications.

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Assessments, Networked Media

My Media Use Analysis: Reflection

I need to do a lot of additional research to inform my essay. So far I’ve written a lot about my own experience and made observations about how I might possibly be able to use online media to support my media practice, but I haven’t backed it up with any concrete research or academic material. I think I’ve identified an area that I’m interested in (using online/social media to support creative practice), but I now need to go and find supporting material to push my thinking further.

My documentation is relatively comprehensive (at least for the purpose at hand), and should give me enough material to work with, but even in the areas where my documentation is lacking I have personal history and experience to draw on and fill in any gaps. In my essay I’m not going to discuss the use of online media for personal (passive) reasons, such as mindlessly browsing a Facebook news feed, so those parts of my documentation will be mostly useless to me now. But I’m glad I collected it anyway, if only for me to realise how much unproductive time I spend on social media.

One major thing I still need to do is come up with a mission statement, a purpose for my essay. It could be a question that I set out to answer, or it could be a statement that I set out to prove or disprove… I haven’t really come up with anything yet, but I’m working on it.

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Assessments, Networked Media

My Media Use Analysis: Evaluation

 

My online media use for the week can be grouped into two broad categorisations: university work, and personal communication/entertainment. Within these categories there are different types of engagement (including most significantly whether I am consuming or creating material), and drilling down even further shows that I often engage with different online media platforms in the same way or for the same ultimate purpose.

My university work included a lot of communication on Facebook and in group messages. The most significant engagement we had with online media was using Soundcloud to publish our demo recording. We were able to use Soundcloud internally within our group to make notes and write annotations on the show itself (using the platform’s timestamped comments), and since it’s public we could also show the demo to others in our class or in the general public if we wish. We submitted the Soundcloud link to our studio leader for assessment too, so it has been tied into every aspect of our work from beginning to end. As we’re all so physically dispersed and can’t often meet up in person, this enabled a level of collaboration that would never have been possible otherwise.

In my personal use of online media, I noted that I often use it for unproductive uses: passive consumption of material on my Facebook news feed, browsing through people’s Instagram photos, etc. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I did notice that the scale of productive/unproductive use is heavily skewed in one direction, at least for the week I was observing my use. Had I not just come back from holiday in Japan, I wouldn’t have had dozens of photographs to publish on my own social media, and may not have actually used online media for creation at all this week.

I think one of the main take-aways from this exercise is that while I haven’t done much creation or media making myself this week, I’ve been fortunate to have seen how others are using online media in a way that supports their work or creative expression, and which I might be able to take advantage of myself. On Day 6 of my data collection the S-Town podcast was released, and I spent about 15 minutes that day poring over the S-Town Facebook page (and have since devoured photos and other material posted to the S-Town subreddit). There are photos of the “characters” in the podcast, pictures and maps of the real-life locations, and discussions around the meaning and interpretation of the podcast. This made S-Town feel almost like an exercise in multi-platform storytelling, where you don’t get the complete picture just from listening to the audio and must search out other materials to round out the experience and fill in the blanks. I can imagine using techniques like these myself if I ever release a serious podcast series, or explore the possibilities of photojournalism, or any number of other ways I can use online media to augment my media practice. Now that I’m more aware of my own online media use, I can start to identify opportunities and take advantage of the affordances of online media.

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Assessments, Networked Media

My Media Use Analysis: Evidence

I’ve spent the last week documenting my online media use, examining how I use the internet and reflecting on what it brings to my life and work. I enumerated the platforms I used, what I used each of them for, and how many times I accessed them. There were some things I left out: if I listed every time I sent a photo of a cute puppy to my girlfriend, for example, I would quickly run out of room for anything else.

But what my documentation did find is that, at least this week, the vast majority of my online media use has been consumption rather than creation. As someone who dabbles in media making regularly (photography, writing, podcasting, etc.) I usually use the internet for publishing purposes much more often than I did this week. Rarely a week goes by without me posting some photos to Instagram, or writing film reviews on Letterboxd, but this week I browsed Instagram and Letterboxd while barely posting to them at all. Part of the reason for this is that I had a couple of university assessments due this week, so I had less time to spend on my own extracurricular media making. How I use the internet for creation, and why I did less of that this week than I normally do, is something for me to consider and evaluate further.

Early in the week I started off meticulously documenting the platforms I used as I was using them, collating everything into a post at the end of each day, but as the week went on I slacked off a little and just took stock of what I’d used at the end of each day without doing any real-time documentation. It greatly helped that most social media platforms now have a stream or log of your activity, which meant that I could just look through my activity log and get an idea of how much I’d been using each platform, rather than writing anything down myself. I suspect if someone had observed me full-time and noted down what I was doing, rather than relying on the strength of my own recollection, I would have collected much more information than I did. But as it is, I think what I’ve done gives me a good, well-rounded idea of my online media habits.

 

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Assessments, Room With a View

RWAV: Demo

Today we recorded our demo at RRR, building towards our first show live on air next month.

[Click here to read my annotations for the demo on Soundcloud]

I’m very happy with the group mates I was assigned in Group 4. Though we all have varying levels of familiarity and experience with radio, each of the members in our group is keen and enthusiastic about our ability to produce a high-quality show. Our roles were easily assigned, as Bec and Chloe were particularly keen to present and I was keen to do panel operation, leaving Georgia and Hannah to act as producers and social media content creators. We all agreed that we should all be actively involved in the production and logistics for the show, which we also made sure was true for the demo.

We booked a couple of practice sessions at RRR in the lead up to our demo. This was particularly important for me as I was overseas during the studio’s initial introduction to the station, and hadn’t stepped foot in the studio until just a couple of weeks before our demo was due to be submitted. Our practice sessions went well — with Bec and Chloe building up their on-air chemistry and me slowly getting my head around the desk — but I have to admit I was pretty nervous going into the demo.

For content we had planned to do at least two live interviews (which would give us extra practice dealing with in-studio guests) but we were only able to find one guest who was available at the time required. Fi Wright ended up being an incredible guest, with an interesting topic to talk about, a natural on-air manner and a very generous and helpful attitude. She even ended up giving me some helpful tips for operating the panel, which is definitely above and beyond for a guest! To fill out the rest of the show we used a couple of pre-recorded pieces — an atmospheric narrative documentary piece that Georgia created for an RMIT studio last year, and an interview with Violent Soho that Bec recorded for SYN FM. Though ideally we would have found more suitable content for our demo, at least we didn’t have to fill all our entire show with conversations between our hosts. I’m sure Bec and Chloe could have chatted to each other for the hour easily, but that wouldn’t have given us much practice for our real show.

As panel operator I was responsible for getting our pre-records and music tracks onto a CD for playback in the studio, but as I don’t own a CD burner I had to do it in the RRR green room minutes before we went into the studio to start recording. Unfortunately, when I loaded the CDs into the studio I found that some of the tracks only had audio in the right channel. I’m not sure what actually caused this issue (I verified that the original files were stereo), but I’ve made a note to ensure I burn the CDs with much more notice next time so I can pick up any issues with enough time to fix them.

For some reason the Violent Soho interview cut off about three minutes before it was supposed to. We were welcoming our guest into the studio at the time so I was distracted from what was going to air, and the momentary shock led to a few seconds of dead air (a crime!) while I quickly jumped on the panel and played a sponsorship announcement I’d already cued up to be played next. It ended up not being as bad as I originally feared, but it’s still a lesson in making sure audio is checked before being played in the studio (and making sure you have the next thing cued up at all times so you can quickly throw to it when needed).

I’ve annotated our demo with some more mistakes and opportunities for improvement we identified — click the link above to read our annotations on Soundcloud.

Our demo was basically exactly what we needed at this stage of our experience with live radio — generally a success, giving us valuable experience with the studio and working collaboratively, and some very specific areas that could be improved before our first on-air show.

Learnings:

  • Practice makes perfect, the more time you spend in the studio the more comfortable you will be
  • Always plan more content than you actually need, because people will inevitably pull out or become unavailable
  • Normalise and check the volume of any audio you expect to go to air
  • Double check burnt CDs for audio glitches before going into the studio
  • Always cue audio one or two steps ahead, in case of disaster
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Assessments, Networked Media

My Media Use: Day 7

Overcast

Late yesterday the team behind This American Life and Serial released the S-town podcast, which I’ve been excited to listen to for months. They’ve released every episode at the same time (Netflix style) to encourage binge-listening, so today I downloaded all seven episodes and began listening using my podcast app Overcast. While listening to the first episode I had a look at the S-town website and Facebook page, where they had posted a bunch of media related to the podcast. There were photos of the people involved in the story, links to reviews and analysis of the podcast, etc., which provided a nice multi-platform experience while I was listening to the audio.

Serial was really exemplary at posting supporting materials and digital media online to help their listeners become immersed in the story. It’s something I’ll keep in mind for my own creative practice in the future, making sure to really take advantage of the distribution platform provided by social media websites.

Facebook and Instagram

First thing in the morning I was tagged in a post on Facebook announcing that DJ Shadow would be touring Australia soon. I took the link I was tagged in and shared it with some friends in Facebook Messenger to give them a heads up and perhaps organise buying tickets together.

Again, today I didn’t interact with social media websites in terms of creation or publication, but I did passively browse and consume material on Facebook and Instagram.

Book club

My book club was meeting in the evening to discuss this month’s book (Submission by Michel Houellebecq) so I took some time in the afternoon to read reviews and discussion pieces on the controversial novel. I read pieces in The Guardian, The New York Times and The New Yorker, and they gave me some interesting insights into the book and some points to discuss at my book club.

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