This week we discussed Institutions & Systems, specifically media institutions and tried to critically analyse what we understand about them. It was slightly confusing trying to decompose an idea that had been established as something completely separate to the process of film-making, but once you break it down it’s understandable how much institutions factor into regular media practice.

As an example we broke down marriage as an institution:

• Expectations
  • values associated with marriage
  • e.g Monogamy
• Law
  • legal framework
  • regulatory
  • Births, Deaths & Marriages
• Meta-institutional
• Widespread
  • Accepted by dominant societies
  • practiced daily by millions worldwide
• Cultural rules
• Rituals & Symbols
• Historical
  • Carry tradition
• Community recognition
  • Society
  • Legally
• Commercial Industry

Then we split up into smaller groups and analysed different institutions that we could be familiar with. My group did Community Media and below is our poster of ideas about it.

So today we had an awakening. We realised that our idea for project brief 4 was going to take too much time and effort to be completed at the exceptional standard that we wanted for ourselves. We also found that it would definitely be tedious to create individual projects and a main video on the side. We bit off more than we could chew and now we have decided it’s time to move past and create something a little simpler but definitely doable. We are changing towards creating an eBook that encompasses the research that each member has conducted on their advertising area, and case studies of ads in those areas. This way we could accomplish the criteria but also not put our hard work on annotated bibliographies to waste. We still like the idea to reconstructing advertisements to sell “nothing” items but it hasn’t been decided whether or not that would be included in the final product. It’s a rocky process, but so far for my audio radio research I found many ads to study. There has also been a handy website that has an amazing number of examples of ads that is pretty similar to what I was initially planning on creating. This website has so many examples of different forms of ads that I have been listening to for years. If you visit the site, click on listen to ads and they explain what the ad type is, in the form of an ad. It’s incredible. Of course I don’t have the production capabilities as this company, but its still possible for me to do something very similar.