BRYDAN MEREDITH, s3547569
A big shift in my learning occurred this year as I moved from the Secondary School paradigm, to a new, freer, more independently driven university environment. In Media 1 there were many different opportunities to learn in versatile and unique ways. In terms of media making, a big learning curve occurred from Project Brief 2 to Project Brief 3. I began to understand that good media making is about communicating specific ideas in abstract, interesting yet comprehensible ways. My first two projects were very straight laced, straight forward; whereas my third project didn’t hand feed the audience meaning, in order for them to read it in a narrow, specific way. I instead embedded meaning less explicitly in my ambiguous yet purposeful work. This shift demonstrates that I learn effectively from experience, from creating.
I found that the theoretical work gave me scope that informed my creative work. A question that bothered me early in the course was ‘What is media?’ It’s such a broad term that’s difficult to pin a set definition on. As I did the various readings such as Scott Mcloud’s ‘Blood in the Gutter’ and Jay Rosens ‘The people formerly known as the audience’ I developed a broader understanding of not only Medias place in the world, but what constitutes Media. After doing the readings weekly I began to understand the importance of noticing, and why we did it so early on in the course. It gave me a broad scope in which to view media. The fact that media is not only in our hands, homes and pockets but in the ‘outside’ environment, emphasised just how broad and important media is in today’s society, even in the physical design of our world. For me, this was not so much of a light-bulb moment but a culmination of the readings and lectorials, which weekly delved into the effects media, has (and has had) in various, diverse aspects of the world.
A key challenge I had was picking out meanings from various readings and looking at how they applied to Media 1. It’s very easy to do a reading and not search for its relevance or understand its context in the course. However towards the end of this semester, I began to see how the readings all fitted in together- that Eduardo Navas’s article on remix culture is strongly correlated to Joshua Meyrowitz’s article ‘Medium Theory: An Alternative to the Dominant Paradigm of Media Effects’. They both relate to the evolution of media and how it has been individualised and streamlined creating the post-broadcast era.
Converting ideas into a media artefact was also a challenge, it’s easy to explicitly write down ideas, but the actual application of the idea (in a creative way) was harder. I found that in terms of my own creative practice, it is best to experiment with the medium I am producing my work in and see what works whilst in the process of creation (instead of umming and arrrring) over how to go about conveying the idea pre-production.
My 5 Blog Posts
Number 1: http://www.mediafactory.org.au/brydan-meredith/2015/05/20/week-11-the-reading/
Number 2: http://www.mediafactory.org.au/brydan-meredith/2015/05/20/week-10-institutions-reading/
Number 3: http://www.mediafactory.org.au/brydan-meredith/2015/05/20/week-8-the-lectorial/
Number 4: http://www.mediafactory.org.au/brydan-meredith/2015/04/13/week-3-blog-reading-tagged-case-study/
Number 5: http://www.mediafactory.org.au/brydan-meredith/2015/04/13/media-lectorial-2/
My Learning Graph
1 is green, 2 is purple, 3 is red and 4 is yellow.
