Yesterday our group came up against our biggest concerns with our project, that the ideas and valuable points to the story aren’t clear enough. Our project takes place over the online presence of Emily, a teenage girl. Obviously Emily isn’t going to realise the irony and cultural significance of her mindset, so it isn’t something she directly writes about and is something that must be read between the lines.

Adding to the problem, as we’re writing with the characteristics of a teenager’s diary, everything is very simple and it might come off as a story that hasn’t had any thought go into it, or even as too real. For example, this is one of our recent posts, and it’s quite significant to our story, but it truly does sound like a teenager lamenting about her inadequacies:

argh sometimes i just cant get over how beautiful Kylie (Kylie Jenner) is………it sucks.

she is my favourite Kardashian sister by far and is such an inspiration. she was barely noticed on the Kardashian’s show until she started her tumblr and vine and now she is everywhere and everyone loves her.

i dont understand how a girl the same age as me has a body like that…blahhh it kills me.
i’ll never have a body like that, i dont have any curves, i havnt even got big enough boobs for a pushup bra to work. how is anyone going to notice me without a face like hers. she has so many followers, just because she’s so beautiful, how does an ordinary person compare?

and her style is always so on point. she really is my inspiration, i just want her life. i’m so lame, i’m at home alone on a friday night, she’s probably living it up with all her famous friends. i bet those girls at school are doing something amazing as well. its harder to make friends here than i thought it would be…

There are several connotations to this post:

• Firstly, how the insecurities of young people are perpetuated by witnessing unrealistic and unnatural ideals projected by the edited and modified presences of celebrities.
• How people can become famous for nothing as Kylie Jenner is, or famous for being beautiful and projecting an ideal life that others follow due to envy and admiration.
• It also develops our character Emily as a deeply insecure person who is dissatisfied with her ordinary life due to making comparisons with the lives of those she follows online, and also through fictional lives, as demonstrated through her obsession with The Carrie Diaries. She represents a great amount of young people who compare themselves to unrealistic role models and lifestyles online and through various media.

The concern is that these points aren’t obvious enough, and it is a challenge to make them clearer. We are also reblogging many photos on the Tumblr, and it might seem as if these posts are chosen at random, however much thought goes into these posts, we choose pictures which both support our themes (demonstrating the ridiculous things that circulate online that are not representative of reality) and portray Emily’s headspace. The reblogging supports the textual posts, but their relationship may not be clear and I’m not sure how to make it clearer considering the challenge of speaking only through Emily’s online presence. I’m hoping that I’m not giving an audience enough credit, and they’ll be able to figure it out for themselves.

I liked the foreshadowing with his arch nemesis when Sherlock saw his in the smog, suggesting that the nemesis is the only thing that Sherlock fears. This to me was where transmedia narrative most came through. These brief instances (we also saw the arch nemesis at the very end) that hint to future episodes are what keep fans interested and anticipating future episodes (a cultural attractor), but they also link the TV episodes so that each one is indeed a part of a greater story. The super-system of Sherlock is the overall story, over each season, and the app. While each season follows a plot line, another system, and each episode has a stand alone story, another system. The interesting thing, and a characteristic of many TV shows, is that the episodes work together as stand-alone stories, but contribute to a greater story universe. This relates to the discussion in class about all parts being greater than themselves, similar to the parts of a transmedia text.

I wouldn’t classify Sherlock, the TV series as a transmedia text though, each episode belongs to a unified story, but they are told across the same platform and are not an extension but an updated version of the books. The app is interesting and could make it a kind of transmedia story; however the game narrative is not very significant to the unified story of the TV show, although it does have ‘easter eggs’ for the community of dedicated Sherlock fans to uncover.

The foreshadowing in Sherlock that I mentioned earlier, drew attention to the fact that within our project, foreshadowing should be used more as a cultural attractor, to add complexity to the plot and to unify the components of our story. We’ve done a little but we really need to do more and I’ll bring this up with our group during the writing process.

Back to Sherlock though, the characterisation was interesting, I am not too familiar with the original Sherlock Holmes books, but I don’t remember him to be sassy, anti-social and probably belonging somewhere on the autism spectrum. However, his quick wit and eccentric qualities make him interesting, entertaining and more relevant to the 21st century, where being as square as you are super intelligent is not edgy enough for modern screens. They also managed to modernise elements of the old stories quite well, making them more interesting and relevant to the now.

Our project is a closed transmedia story, because the audience is limited to navigating the narrative rather than having the ability to alter the outcome of the narrative, thus it does not have an external structure.

The cultural attractors of our story are the shared (tragic) desire to pry into other people’s lives, and the especially interesting and tragic nature of Emily’s online persona.

The cultural activator of our project is the ability of the audience to navigate our character and her sad online persona at their own leisure, deploying agency and uncovering key elements of the plot.

The desired Umwelt of our story is that the audience will feel like they’re following a trail of signs and links through the online world just like usual, if they were looking into the background of a character.

I’ve never been much of a team player. I prefer to work on my own, because I know how I think and how I best get things done. I don’t have to run my ideas or decisions by anyone else before I implement them, it just runs smoother. In any situation, things are much simpler when there is only one person involved; one brain is conflicting enough on its own, partner it with another and things get difficult. However, being simpler doesn’t mean that it’s easier. In a good team with a good system and clear roles and duties, things do run smoothly and the workload for each individual becomes lightened. I experienced that in the hospitality industry, but not until one and a half years into my degree did I experience it at uni. We’ve done a lot of group work in my 2.25 years at uni, in just about every course I’ve taken, but only this semester’s group and two groups that I was lucky to be in last semester, have worked well together.

The most important factor in a team is communication. This involves being comfortable enough to tell someone when you don’t like their idea, or that they’re not pulling their weight. The positive stuff is easy to communicate, the negative stuff not so much. Communication is also important where you all need to be on the same page and working toward the same goal. These have been the issues in previous years, either I (and other team members) chose not to voice my opinions until it was far too late and everyone ended up getting frustrated, or we all had different ideas about what we wanted to accomplish or create, and everyone ended up getting frustrated.

This semester, my group is excellent. I get along with Matt, Sarah and Mollie really well, and while we’re all quite different we find a lot of common ground and sometimes we probably get along too well (getting excited -me especially, running off topic and discussing some awesome thing probably to do with feminism or cinema, or feminism and cinema, that has nothing to do with the task at hand). But this is our biggest problem as a group, and when we really dedicate time to the task we stay on task, and allow chat breaks when we start to become mentally exhausted.

We all voice our ideas, and our ideas have developed our story on multiple levels. And when someone feels like an idea is off-centre, or they don’t understand how an idea functions within the story, it’s easy to bring it up and discuss it, work on it or ditch it. We all pull our weight, because we all want to make the story as good as possible, and get it finished as smoothly as possible. These are our common goals. We haven’t had a conflict, and you don’t really know how well a group functions until a conflict arrises and you see how well you deal with it, but I don’t think one will given the timespan.

Basically, I feel like my attitude towards group work has really changed for the better due to this semester, this class and this group. I know that if you choose your team wisely, communicate well and are all passionate about the idea and the desired outcome, things will go well. This greatly improves your work ethic, the final outcome, and your personal takings from the given material. I will work toward choosing great team members, communicating well and creating a great group dynamic in future because I can see now how much it improves my experience of a course. Sometimes it’s the luck of the draw but if you’re able to create that excellent group dynamic, everything gets better.