The following is my reflection for Project Brief 4

This project was a fun and stressful experience. In all of my educational career I had never encountered a group task that would be so vital to my overall mark. It wasn’t that working with Annie and Sammy was hard, it was the added pressure of doing your part and supporting the other members to the best of my ability. I felt the responsibility and the standard that I had to constantly keep in order to not let down my group, but also achieve that High Distinction we were all hoping for. But all my fretting was in vain since our group dynamics worked really well with each other. One of the key aspects to working in a group is that ideas could be presented that I couldn’t have never thought of, and having another person’s opinion available to help guide and flesh out ideas was crucial in our final decisions on our artefact. We went through a lot of ideas and different ways to complete our project, and especially at the initial stages of the project all three of us had no clue as to what type of product we wanted to produce. But the fact that we were all open to ideas and wanted to try something outside of the box helped the project move on swiftly. I especially believe that our ability to freely communicate to each other comfortably was vital in the execution of the final piece.

Since our topic was ‘Texts’, a very broad topic, we chose to just research as many varied areas as possibly during the annotated bibliography exercise. This part was executed well with all three of us presenting varied topics, but also haring common themes in advertising and audience perception. It was from this that we decided to focus on advertisements as a text, and the way they are represented in many forms of text. The choice to focus on specifically advertisements in the media world allowed us a focal point to channel all our energy into, and helped us all understand what the final product should address. This helped tremendously when I myself felt confused by the lack of boundaries set for the project brief, because since we decided amongst ourselves that it would focus around one area under the ‘Texts’ umbrella I was able to get back on track and avoid branching off into topics that would take too long to express and fully develop. Our initiative to narrow the area we covered in our product allowed for us to develop our understanding of advertisements thoroughly and dedicate more time into presenting a completely comprehensive piece of work.

However there were a few hiccups at the beginning when at first we had intended to embed a video focusing on ads in the real world onto a website that would have more ads surrounding and bombarding the viewer. It was intended to be very Meta and actually depict how in your face advertisements are, and all members had agreed it would be a genius idea if we could pull it off. But as we had split off to do our own individual research we found it was difficult to cover so many areas and also reflect our research into the group video we were planning on creating. It was difficult, but after some consulting with Robbie and peers we decided that an eBook would be a better platform for us to present our research into the different areas of texts and advertisements. We acknowledged that for the timeframe we had to complete the task that it was impossible to create such an ambitious task and complete it to a standard that would satisfy all members. So we divided the workload again, but this time we knew what was manageable and what each member had to complete. This maturity and our ability to adapt to the new plan reflected everyone’s hard work ethic, and this overall was the best experience I gained from working on the project.

In the process of collaborating and creating the final product I learnt that it isn’t necessarily as easy it is to plan out a task and follow through start to finish as smoothly as in structured high school tasks. I did gain a lot of knowledge about audio advertisements, and a better understanding of why radio advertisements work as a whole, but this experience really did help me get a better feel of what to expect in future group tasks and what kind of attitude I should approach a project. Having an open and flexible mind about everything helped solve any possible conflict, and for myself to become a media practitioner in the future I need to be able to adapt and read situations just like I did in this project. I enjoyed the process of working with peers immensely, and believe that next time I will be better equipped to communicate and function as a team better than before.

The robots are coming, and soon all our lives will be obsolete as technology allows us to finally evolve into the Wall-E universe humans. But does technology dictate society right now or are we still in charge? It’s a tough question, what with the millions of people slaving away at computers, tablets and smartphones per day it is a wonder we still have a functioning society. It’s a funny thing when describing the impact technology has on our evolution and thinking about how before we industrialized everything and ruined the Earths natural homeostasis natural disasters and plagues ruled over us. Now we have to decide whether to continue on this path of technological advancement or to reject and find another way of life, because we all know that it is not going to end well if we don’t move things along soon. But there’s the crux in our evolutionary block. Do we determine how we move on from here or will technology do it for us. Are we inventing technology or was it already there to be discovered? It’s like when consider the origins of maths, did it always exist or did we make it up?

I see it as Dan pointed out, as a natural extension of humanity. It has become so fundamental in our lives, and our dependency on it has changed how we approach everything now.