Tag / media 1

by harrietread

My Take on Alternate Realities

When I say alternate realities, I’m not necessarily talking about Narnia, the Matrix, space-time travel or anything like that. I’m talking more about the realities within our minds that are constructed by our experiences and perspectives.

About a week ago, I made a post about how some of the things that Donald Trump says look good on paper, and that people do have reasons for wanting to support him. I’m going to extend that post a little further, thanks to a recent publication by the Wall Street Journal after they did a study on how social media news feeds can affect who people are more aligned to.

What Wall Street Journal’s Jon Keegan has done is set up two feeds which have real conversations and posts that individuals have posted on Facebook, and aligned them into a red ‘conservative’ feed and a blue ‘liberal’ feed. Users who posted all of these uploads, of which there were up to 10.1 million of them, were anonymised but had their political label analysed.

Based on the study’s findings, and the presentation of conservative vs liberal posts on Facebook, one can logically come to the conclusion that as long as you are receiving media texts from entirely one political standing, you are reinforcing your already existing beliefs. It seems fairly logical and simplistic, but at the same time it’s interesting to consider how different the political situation in the US would be if social media were different to how it currently is. It makes a little more sense in the world in terms of exactly how people align themselves to certain ideas or political figures. The reinforcement theory we learned in high school comes into play, as how we tailor what we prefer to see and choose to omit from our feeds reinforces reality as we perceive it.

by harrietread

Media 2 STUDIOS

Sooo the next 2 and a half years of Media will be studio based. These are project based which is exciting to me because I like having something practical to do. Theory is awesome, but it’s kind of one of those balance things: too much of one without the other, too much oversaturation of either one, is completely exhausting on every level.

It’ll be made up of (technically) 5 assessments, going from PB1 to PB4B, over fourteen weeks. I’m hoping that in comparison to this semester it won’t be as emotionally or psychologically draining. Then again, since it will involve a lot of practical work and group work, it could sap the last drops of life from me.

by harrietread

My Take on Story-Telling

Today’s lectorial on storytelling really got me interested in my own experience with storytelling. Since I can remember, I have loved to create and imagination stories and worlds and fantastical journeys, and expressed these in drawings and attempts at writing books. Whatever I came up with, I had to get it down in some way, and I could spend a few hours or weeks obsessed with an idea; one of my primary school teachers thought I’d be CEO of Puffin or Penguin books. As I entered middle school and high school, that passion waned a little; I spent less time creating and more time consuming media, which isn’t so bad really. But now that high school and VCE is over, I want to get back and create again.

Something that I think became a weaker point in my productions towards the end of highschool was my ability to create a strong story, and instead spent all my time trying to impress myself and others with what I thought was avante-garde film techniques, cool editing and an unusual and difficult to function piece of steadying gear I got for ten bucks on eBay. It wasn’t until I looked back on these old films I’d made, and also until this lectorial, that it became apparent to me that the techniques, gear, cinematography and visuals that go into a film don’t mean anything without a solid story.

I also got this epiphany watching Casey Neistat’s vlogs and films, in which he encourages aspiring filmmakers to care less about the gear and equipment you use, and more about developing a story or idea. Story is what drives the film, and the equipment, regardless of whether they are a point and shoot camera or an expensive camera drone, are just the tools we use to present the story.