networked media – Its Everybody's Business

Tag: networked media

Have I Made it?

For the past seven years I have been creating content on YouTube, throughout this time I have experimented with many different genres and styles in order to find my voice. From parody music video to toying with special effects. Eventually, I have come to realise that uplifting comedy is really where I would like to leave my impression. However, making comedy videos on youtube requires one to have a whole new set of literacies. For example, on youtube the trolling community is quite large, I have received a number of hateful comments, something which I explore here. Jay Oatway explores this in his discussion about content creation, one thing that he emphasises is to first fully understand your community, to follow them on blogs and social media, in order to understand their expectations. To put it briefly, the reason that hate is often received is because the audience is receiving content that they do not expect. For example, my most disliked video is called “How to get money from vending machines”, when i look at the Youtube Analytics of this video, I am able to see that the audience mainly comes from the youtube search, which are people who legitimately believe that I’m going to show them how to make a buck. However, once they click on the video they realise its comedy and become quite upset, and revert to trolling. I explore this in more depth on my blog post here.

This whole dynamic is quite interesting, it is reminiscent of the Anonymous phenomenon that originated on fourchan. According to the BBC Documentary “How Hackers Changed the World”, the anonymous group has a very strong sense of community and understanding. One of the members while discussing the protests on scientology, explained that suddenly everybody who knew the same jokes as each other were coming together. Not only jokes, but the same set of shared values and culture. Thus, there was such a passion about certain acts of hacktivism which they conducted, such as taking down the Neo-Nazi Hal Turner. It is incredible to believe that something so intangible like the internet can develop such a large network of independant literacies. Andrew Blum, touches on this briefly in his TED Talk “What is the Internet Really” when he states that “my relationship to the physical world had changed”. Memes are a great example of this, they often sit online and are constantly remixed and recycled like on a “petri dish” until they become a subset of internet culture. Rosanna Guadagno also explores this in her study about what makes a video go viral, she explores the importance of emotional impact and found that a video was more sharable when it had emotion provoking content. I would like to compare this to a common stand-up comedy theory, discussed by the likes of Gene Perret and Judy Carter. Its understood that audience expectation and a sense of community is often what makes or breaks an engagement. In my case, because I have been developing my own voice, I often have not provided my audience with consistent content. This I believe it what has opened me up to hate messages. By constantly shifting my content, the audience does not know what they are receiving, and opposes my work.

Resources:

YouTube. (2016). BBC Documentary – How Hackers Changed the World [Full]. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfCewYcnSu4 [Accessed 8 May 2016].

YouTube. (2016). Andrew Blum: What is the Internet, really?. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XE_FPEFpHt4 [Accessed 8 May 2016].

Oatway, J. (2012). Mastering story, community and influence. Chichester, West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley.

Guadagno, Rosanna E. et al. ‘What Makes A Video Go Viral? An Analysis Of Emotional Contagion And Internet Memes’. Computers in Human Behavior 29.6 (2013): 2312-2319. Web.

Perret, G. (2007). The new comedy writing step by step. Sanger, CA: Quill Driver Books/Word Dancer Press.

Carter, J. (2001). The comedy bible. New York: Fireside.

Pohate-o for the Potato

May 8, 2016 / Jordan Raj / 0 Comments

As with every professional engagement, being a content creator on youtube comes with its workplace hazards – In this case. Trolls. Over the years I’ve become accustomed to receiving not-so-positive comments, and have started to enjoy the creativity and often hilariousity of them. Last week this gem popped up under one of my videos:

Ouch, well, this leaves a bad taste in my mouth… In situations like this I cant help but laugh, In a way i feel complimented. Some person somewhere in the world has actually sat down, watched my video, logged in to youtube, thought about a comment, and responded to me, just to tell me how much they hated my video. I appreciate that.

Sometimes Ive felt so loved that I felt obliged to reply to the troll:
Sadly, In these situations their initial creativity disappears and they often dont respond as viciously. Either way, its never a boring conversation.

I suppose what im trying to say is, people often ask me if the hate bothers me. I reply “not really, Ive gotten used to it, in fact I find it quite amusing”

Iv’e Been Thinking

May 7, 2016 / Jordan Raj / 0 Comments

Despite all the experimentation that has been happening on my youtube channel, one thing that ive always really wanted to maintain is uplifting content. I want to make people think and be entertained at the same time. Thats why I started the “Ive been thinking” series:

Here are the first four episodes:

It will be interesting to see how my audience reacts, considering they are used to comedy content from me.

If I Could Interview Ed Sheeran

April 26, 2016 / Jordan Raj / 0 Comments

Finally, after weeks of trying to get round to editing this video, it has finally been released, and the Facebook reaction video one is still not out. For shame. Either way, this video was filed at the same time, and i figured the urgency to post this was more.

Reflection Thus Far

April 10, 2016 / Jordan Raj / 0 Comments

Blogging has always been a difficult form of expression for me, probably because of the nature of its creation. It requires one to sit down and write, although writing itself is not difficult, I find it less entertaining than to make a video or post a photo.

However, Adrian Miles provided an interesting insight about the uses of blogging which got me thinking. He states that a blog can be used in teaching to “nurture peer support” and “assist in idea creation”. This idea seems very reminiscent of google docs, a platform that allows one to write content and then have others comment, edit and respond to it. However, the advantage of a blog is that it is public, thus it allows a network literate audience to get involved with the idea generating process.

Thus, to find a place for blogging in my own life, I decided to post about the content I am creating in other forms, using it as a springboard to share the content and reach my audience. The reason this is particularly useful to me is because i spread myself thin across many different social media outlets, and blogging could bring it all together; Adrian Miles has acknowledged this: “The key advantage of network literacy is that different services or websites are all able to communicate with each other.”

For example I used one of my posts as a behind the scenes pinboard, where I placed content about the creative process, production and scripting of a video. The post can be found here. It links together images and video to give a visual overview of the process and facilitate the engagement with the final product.

The issue however is that there is not that much reciprocity in this arrangement, whereas most social media or content sharing sites will provide you with either “views” or a quick and easy “like” feature, blogging forces users to comment – which is comparably less common. For example, I did another post about my song Sick Of Citrus, which brought together audio, via soundcloud with the instagram post of the song, however there was no indicator of an audience response. This is the reason I prefer to use other mediums.

However I do believe that using blogging as a secondary medium could work. Julia Erhart in her ‘Mr G is deffinately bringin’ Sexy back’ study, explores how Chris Lilley uses multiple platforms to communicate with his audience and build expectation. Because he had a large following on TV, its easier to use online content as a springboard. Hopefully I could do something similar between my blog and YouTube channel.

Overall, my blogging experience has been very developmental, I am not yet entirely sold on the idea of using blogs, however I am willing to experiment with the platform at a hyperlink springboard for other contents.

References:

Miles, Adrian. Blogs in Media Education: A Beginning [online]. Screen Education, No. 43, 2006: 66-69. Availability:<http://search.informit.com.au.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/documentSummary;dn=374037672250272;res=IELAPA>ISSN: 1449-857X. [cited 10 Apr 16].

Miles, Adrian. Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge [online]. Screen Education, No. 45, 2007: 24-30. Availability:<http://search.informit.com.au.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/documentSummary;dn=805521387210748;res=IELAPA>ISSN: 1449-857X. [cited 10 Apr 16].

Erhart, Julia. (2014). ‘Mr G is deffinately bringin’ Sexy back’: characterizing Chris Lilley’s YouTube audience. Continuum, 28(2), pp.176-187.

Clickets

April 5, 2016 / Jordan Raj / 0 Comments

Dear Friends! I have gathered you here today to make a proposition, a proposition so grave that many of you will disregard it as foolish. Now, im sure many of you are aware with the word nepotism, however if you are not, I have provided the defenition below.

nepotism – the practice among those with power or influence of favouring relatives or friends, especially by giving them jobs.

My proposition is that we start using the term ‘Webotism’

webotism – a closed circuit environment of hyperlinks that keep a user experience within one website. ie.”keeping it in the fam”

This week during our tutorial we were playing a little click game. We basically started on any webpage that tickled our fancy, and then we clicked ALL THE THINGS – meaning we clicked around on links until we ended up somewhere interesting. However, being me, i got slightly distracted and asked myself. “How long would it take for me to get from a random page – to a page about a topic of my choosing. So i chose cats. Within 5 minutes of clicking around on links I traveled from Wikihow – How to be a Youtube Star all the way to Cat faces existential nightmare over electronic kitty bank. Basically, I succeeded.

But what we learn? and How does this link to Webotism?

Well – Lemme just say, it was incredibly difficult to leave that Wikihow website, all the links were kept internal; to other guides and profiles. The only way out was to find their social media, and even then they were sharing all their own links. Eventually I found the name of a random person who had commented on their post, using them as a springboard out of there and serendipitously landing on cat videos! YES!

Sick of Citrus

March 22, 2016 / Jordan Raj / 0 Comments

This is a post that is almost BETTER out of context than in context. So I’ll just drop this on you:

Original Song “Sick of Citrus” now on SoundCloud… @jrnwfire #SickOfCitrus #OriginalSong #Guitar

A video posted by Jordan Raj (@jrnwfire) on Jan 29, 2015 at 7:56pm PST

Ok, now that you are sufficiently confused, I will explain. Arriving back in Brisbane after three from the Czech Republic I was eager to get down to business, take the Australia of opportunity by its throat and make it boogie. I was staying with my Aunt and Uncle at the time and was asked if I would be interested in working for their food stall at the Falls Music Festival. I agreed.

Long story short, I started getting sick during the festival, and quickly made sure to cure my sore throat with the lemonade from the stall next door to us. With the words lemon, citrus, sick and sugar-free floating around, suddenly the phrase “sick of citrus” popped up. My instant reaction was “that would make a great song title”, and so promptly upon return to Brisbane, Sick of Citrus was written – with the sole intent to use that phrase.

Here is the full song:

is Hypermedia Fragmented?

March 22, 2016 / Jordan Raj / 0 Comments

This week we started looking at hypermedia and hypertext. Firstly to define these terms, for those of you less inclined to be NERDS. Jks. Hypertext is basically the little blue links you see all over the internet. Its linking a whole heap of ideas, or pages together to create a whole piece. Hypermedia is an extension of hypertext, its when you put together more than simply text, but you link in videos and images and sounds, basically other media, through embedding.

One thing which caught my attention was the suggestion that this is a fragmented approach, however I disagree. Perhaps it is essentially a generation gap or difference in perspective, but i believe the bring together of lots of mediums to create something is actually more wholesome than having a singular source. Hypertext can be likened to references in an essay, you are using all the sources to come together to make a seasoned whole. Having the sources kept separately is compartmentalized and dichotomized.

The hypermedia experience seems reminiscent of the ‘Google now’ protocols, this is a software that runs on my phone, it reads my calendar, emails, searches and location and puts together a curated field of information which is basically a field of hypermedia. Often it can appear creepy, but once you get used to it, it becomes amazing, because all your stuff is in one place. so overall I would like to say im a believer in Hypermedia being the way of the future and I cant wait to see where it takes us.

Late Reaction

March 15, 2016 / Jordan Raj / 0 Comments

This week im working on a video regarding the new reaction videos on facebook, you know the ones:

Without going into too much detail about the video itself (I will post it here when it is complete) I wanted to touch on the making of Process. The video is filmed in what i like to refer to as my studio, which is really my bedroom and some coloured paper. I set up three lights, one camera and a microphone and hit record. I then roll the camera for sometimes one and a half hours simply capturing footage of myself talking to camera. I usually follow rough script which is on a laptop just out of frame. Im alone in my room and this means that i can be as silly as i need to be to get my point across and don’t have to worry about embarrassment, i simply cop it all later. Here is a video of me getting distracted in the 12th minute of footage:

I am saying “In Cheeye” which is Farsi for “What is this?”… Im learning Farsi… I then say “In Kheily cool bood” which i believe means “This is very cool”… I was alone.

Once I film, the process involves me copying all the information onto a single folder onto my computer, since this video does not have many scenes I can copy all the information into one folder without it getting too confusing:

As you can see, the audio and the video are seperate files that need to be synced together later. The editing process starts here, I use Adobe Premiere Pro to go through all the footage and cut it into a final product.

When the editing is complete and I export the video in 1080p and upload it to my YouTube Channel, making sure that I have a cool Thumbnail for the video. Something like this:

Once all this is done I share the video link to Facebook and beg my friends to watch it… Simple…

I aim for the final video to be posted by this Sunday the 20th of March… I hope… Now that I have written this post I simply have to follow through…

Its Everybody's Business

We gotta Stick Together