Tag Archives: bachelor of communication (media)

Week 12: Media Materialism

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  1.  Technology
    1. Role of human body – technology, functional tool
  2. Technique
    1. Things are taught to us – social expectations and how we react to them, based on our values and upbringing
  3. Culture
    1. Identifying subgroups within population
    2. The world as culture, humankind
    3. Art, theatre, cinema: creative expression

There are contradictions between the above three features of media materialism, each of which are ever-changing and unpredictable. The culture industry, for one, is dictated by people’s own personal tastes and incorporates aspects of human life, as well as design and manufacturing.

“Culture is something that we do, but it is also something that we are.”

  • Technological determinism vs. social constructivism
    • Essential question: Does technology dictate culture or do we control how technology progresses?
    • No matter the innovation, it’s still up to us how we control the use and regulation of technology
    • This view accounts for the humanness in creation and innovation
    • “You’re only human” – development is a process

Examples of Technology:

  • Walkman – create our own soubdtrack, cut out outside sound cues of the world, changed the way we engaged with the world
  • Dziga Vertov believed the camera is a natural extension of the eye and brain, and thus the only way to capture the transactions of life
  • Valorie Curry – Kara

Thinking about the ….

  • Holocene (geological period)
  • Anthropocene – the age of humans
    • Largely the damage (destruction of the planet) is already done
    • Molecular red: theory for the anthropocene – McKenzie Wark
    • In modern media there is an obsession with resources and the end of the world (at least as we know it)
      • Dystopian societies, preparing for an apocalypse

Advice on Brief 4

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Last week, Rachel made some suggestions for how we could best progress with our final project brief.

  • Make sure that everyone is asking the same questions of the texts they are analysing (this prompted us to create a list of 3 questions to focus our work)
  • Keep the focus narrow so you can increase the depth of the work
    • Take out side ideas – remixing, Space Odyssey
    • Left with: Texts > Adaptations > Romeo & Juliet
  • Extra ideas for looking at Romeo & Juliet
    • Look at soundtracks separately from the films as this is a whole different medium
      • E.g. original soundtrack composed for West Side Story
    • Book of West Side Story

This advice was helpful for us as it gave us a better idea of the direction we needed to go in for our brief and helped us clarify in our heads the work we still needed to complete.

“True to the Spirit” – Adaptations & Textual Analysis

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One of my sources for Project Brief 4 was a book titled, True to the Spirit: film adaptation and the question of fidelity, by Colin MacCabe, Kathleen Murray and Rick Warner.

The following are the notes I took that have helped me to better understand what is meant by “textual analysis”. This reading will be invaluable going forward with analysing the different adaptations of Romeo & Juliet, as I intend to incorporate these analytical tools into my work on this brief.

  • “First error: critics claim films have a duty to be faithful to a literary source. Second error: Critics ignore the unique language of cinema and thus do not acknowledge a filmic adaptation to be an independent cinematic work.”-p41
  • “acknowledge film adaptations as specifically cinematic, rather then viewing them simply as translations into another medium of the essence of the work”-p42
    • NOTE: Shakespeare seen as highly academic while adaptations lose the essence of this
  • “Transformation that takes place between the source text and the final film. This includes changes made in the story as well as the more subtle transformations involved in the transfer to another medium…“textual information”…“diverse semiotic levels”…“adjustments that take place during shooting, and quite crucially during post-production…”-p42-43
  • “Innovative staging and composition, lighting, decor and styles of acting, and most importantly, a variety of means of conveying characters’ motivations or reactions, frequently occur in films that involve literary appropriation.”-p45
  • *Of silent films in particular* – “order of narrative incidents… early filmic adaptations frequently retell the events in strictly chronological order, converting literary back-story into the early narrative events”-p49
    • Flashbacks were introduced to film at a later date

Structuring Brief 4

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This week, we created a proper plan to split up the work between group members. Rob will be working on the adaptations page of the blog, conducting an interview with a dancer who creates adaptations for a living. Lucas will create the introduction for the Romeo & Juliet page and I will do the same for the static home page, “Texts”. Lucas and I will also analyse a number of Romeo & Juliet adaptations – including West Side Story – in different mediums.

We came up with three questions to help keep our analyses focused and on the same track.

  1. What is the core focus of this adaptation?
    • Themes, characters, story, setting
    • Do these elements stay constant or are changes made?
  2. How does each adaptation reflect the time in which it was made?
  3. How does the form influence the message and relatability of the text?

The coming week…

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The next week will be busy in terms of working towards completing a polished draft of our media artefact. There are a number of things that still need to be done, which include:

  1. Watching each of the films and productions I will be analysing
  2. Researching academic interpretations and critiques of these texts to cement my own analyses in theory with a sound understanding of the context of each
  3. Answering in depth the three standard questions we are asking of each text
  4. Working on editing the aesthetics of the blog
  5. Adding to the “texts” page of the blog using information from further research
  6. Keeping track of new sources and write brief annotations for each

Aside from the project, I also need to write some more blog posts!

Institutions

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Institutions are organising structures of society that deal with social, cultural, political and economic relations, as well as the principles, values and rules that underly these relations. They cannot simply be ideas; they need to have a form (or a currency of some sort). Examples include the police, city council local government, education and journalism.

Marriage as a Social Institution:

  • Expectations
    • Values (e.g. monogamy)
    • Rituals – exchanging vows
    • Symbols – rings
    • Rights
    • Superstitions – unlucky to see the bride in her dress before the wedding
  • Legal framework/regulatory
  • Meta-institutional frame
  • Widely accepted practice
  • Cultural ‘rules’
  • Social recognition

Media institutions:

  • are enduring
  • regulate and structure activities
  • are ‘collectivist’
  • develop working practices
  • employees and people associated are expected to share values
    • e.g. sports journalist fired for his comments on ANZAC day
    • professionalisation and accreditation
    • qualifications that are necessary to be regarded in a profession
  • public is aware of the status

Institutional Characteristics:

  • Facebook
    • Way of life
    • Ubiquity/Interconnectedness – other apps will ask if you want to “share”
      • Raises the question of privacy
    • Advertisements from other things you have looked at on the internet show up on Facebook
    • Privately-owned
    • Differentiation between real life and the life people see on Facebook
      • Present a certain portrayal of yourself
  • Newscorp
    • POWER
      • Almost a monopoly
      • Channels
    • Status
    • Fair? Balanced?
      • Still needs to adhere to the standards of journalism
    • Vertically and horizontally integrated
    • Journalistic conventions
    • Code of ethics on their website – question the extent to which this is adhered to
    • Agenda-setting/framing
  • Google
    • Innovation
    • Social conscience
      • Do no evil
    • Mission: Organise the world’s information and make it useable and useful
    • Accessibility – global reach
    • Contemporariness
    • Google as…
      • a culture
      • a verb
        • brand connected to a way of doing things
      • googol – a number with 100 zeros
  • Community Media
    • Not-for-profit
    • Lo-fi filming
    • Lack of advertising – commercial aspect much smaller, if it exists at all
    • Content
      • Local focus
      • Passion-driven
      • Experimentation – taking risks
    • Diversity
    • Governance/regulation (or lack thereof)

Work Attachment

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Notes about Media work attachment (spoken about in week 10 lectorial)

  • Minimum 1500-word report but often much longer
    • Serves to demonstrate learning experience through the attachment
  • Reflections in google drive – not on the blog or in any other public place
  • Best to get as much experience as possible while RMIT has you insured
  • Minimum 80 hours
    • Must be approved by Paul Ritchard
    • Then fill in form about attachment

Previous internships:

  • Australian Chamber of Commerce – events and communications team
  • Newspaper
    • Australian Financial Review
    • Shanghai Daily

Goals for future internships/work attachments:

  • Newspapers – The Age, the Herald Sun
  • Marketing & communications team – National Australia Bank, Telstra
  • Advertising agency
  • …

I’m so excited that this is a part of the degree and I can’t wait to start searching for opportunities!

Remembering to Notice

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“I remember everything. I forget nothing. I write everything down so that later I’ll know exactly what happened.” – Thomas Klopper, The Book of Everything (by Richard Tulloch)

This past week, I have been working intensively on a play I am in, The Book of Everything. Being in the cast of a production has taught me so much about awareness and noticing, because I have to know myself and my surroundings well enough to be able to switch off my ‘ticks’, become my character and immerse myself in her world.

In the past week, here are some things I’ve noticed…

  1. Ordinary noticing:
    1. Our director told each of us about our acting ticks. Mine are that I play with my hair when I’m nervous and there are times when I get distracted and come out of character for a couple of seconds. When he told me my ticks, I was vaguely aware of them, but I had never actively stopped to think about them before.
  2. Marking:
    1. During each run, I made a mental note of all the cues to remember throughout the performance
    2. Each day we had a performance, I made a concerted effort to remember our pre-show cast rituals
    3. I thought about a key moment during each performance to tell the cast about afterwards, as part of a cast sharing tradition
  3. Recording:
    1. After each run of the performance, I wrote down each of the points our director made about things that needed to be changed or improved upon
    2. At the end of the process, I wrote down a number of things I learnt from being a part of this performance because I want to remember the people and the experience, and be able to look back on it during the rehearsal process for future productions I hope to work on

Brief 4: New Ideas (& Annotated Bibliographies)

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Today, we each came to class with our annotated bibliographies and a much fuller understanding of where we wanted to go with the project. Our research made it much easier to think about the topic in more concrete terms, and our ideas flowed from there.

Here are our team meeting minutes from today to illustrate the progress we made on our project today and where we are now.

07/05/2015

    • Met up before media tutorial
    • Spoke about our research findings
      • Rob: remixing, copyright in relation to parodies, semiotics
      • Lucas: evolution of audiences and interpretation of meaning, semiotics
      • Emma: adaptations (literary works to films), semiotics
    • Discussed with Rachel how to narrow down topic
      • Texts > Adaptations > Literary to Film OR specific author
    • Further discussion of this within our group led to the decision to focus on the works of William Shakespeare
      • Modern adaptations
      • Twelfth Night – She’s the Man (film)
      • Romeo & Juliet
        • Shakespeare Play > Modern Plays > Movies > West Side Story Film and Plays
    • 2 separate parts
      • Basics of adaptations and remixes (Rob – interviews)
      • Romeo & Juliet – linked to West Side Story (focused on the differences between adaptations and the effect this has)

For next week, our task is to have something concrete to show for our research. For our group, this will be footage from the interviews Rob has set up, and a set structure for the website we will create, with the following:

  • Introduction to our group and the subject of ‘texts’, also introducing ‘adaptations’
  • Sections of the website
  • Planned content (which media we will use and who will work on which aspects)

Every week, as I get a better idea of where this project is heading, I am more and more excited to see the final product (artefact) our research will culminate in.

“Audience”

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Personally, when I am working I sometimes get so caught up in what I’m creating that I forget that others will eventually see and (hopefully) enjoy my work. In my final two years of school particularly, I learnt the importance of keeping the audience at the forefront. At the end of the day, my ideas and intentions for my work mean nothing if I fail to clearly convey that to the receiver, or “audience”.

Who cares about audiences?

  • Advertisers
  • Commercial broadcasters, cable networks, etc.
  • Government policy makers – licensing accountability, censorship
  • Social scientists/psychologists, cultural theorists/media scholars – how media affects people in their daily lives

The target audience may completely change the content, the medium and the platforms used by advertising companies to sell a product.

Changing conceptions of audiences and consumers:

  • Broadcast to post-broadcast age
    • Characteristics of a post-broadcast era – changes in aesthetic sensibilities, audience practices, television institutions, technologies of production, distribution and consumption (and how to use them)
    • Rise in network culture
    • How we consume media – all around us, inescapable in the modern world
  • From citizens to consumers

“There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses… a way of seeing people which has become characteristic of our kind of society… [a way of seeing that] has been capitalised for the purse of cultural or political exploitation.” 

We need to be conscious of how we position ourselves – cannot simply say, “I am better than you” because we all fall under the category of “the masses”.

Theorising the ‘active audience’:

  • Audience’s intelligence recognised by creators
  • Fans and engagement – they contribute in some way
    • Binge-watching television shows (becomes an obsession)
    • Creation of fandoms – keep up with every action of a particular person/band
    • Giving yourself over to the text by immersing yourself in another world and forming connections with characters
  • Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model (1980)
    • Communication is a gamble
    • Make short film – code mise en scene, characters etc. hoping audience will understand meaning – hoping they will interpret the same way as it was intended
    • Audience has to recognise, make sense of (by assembling) – happens subconsciously

Interpellation: the process by which individuals/readers are “hailed” (prompted by a text to recognise themselves as being a subject that belongs in a role) – Louis Althusser

Components of the Broadcast ratings convention

  • Exposure is the key element – how many people see an advertisement (challenge)
  • Can’t measure engagement after seeing advertising (limitation)
  • Accuracy of measuring – intensified in recent years but this is not a new issue (challenge)

Taste

  • “We are seduced by our own preferences; our likes and dislikes”
  • Different people like and dislike different things – broad range
  • Not inherent (not born with taste) – it is a result of what we grow up with

Without an audience, a work cannot be recognised and will not spark the action it intends to. Research into a target audience is also increasingly important, as we now live in such a world that the consumer decides what they want and companies deliver, as opposed to the other way around.