Tag: assignment 1

Assignment 1: Reflection

oliviamcdonald on

The practical test that I did with my partner Jess was a short, half-hour long video that chronicled thirty minutes of me using my phone, from within the phone. In other words, it was a screen recording of the different things I did and how I wasted my time on my phone. The main characteristic that we were responding to was the unregulated nature of online screen production, as I talked about in my development blog post.

Our test responds to this characteristic as it demonstrates that you can publish anything you want on the internet. While a screen capture may be insightful or educational, the one we made wasn’t particularly, or at least that wasn’t the intention. It was 29 minutes and 15 seconds of a vague pointlessness. However, that didn’t stop us making it and dropping into the void of the internet.

It also responded to the “unregulated” characteristic as it highlighted the variety of things I could do on my phone, but more importantly on the internet, through my phone. Messaging friends, searching the internet, playing games, taking photos, publishing my photos. This further demonstrates how many different technologies the internet has given birth to, and helps us imagine what could be to come. So maybe we could say that our video or short film wasn’t totally pointless, but it definitely wasn’t of a high quality.

In terms of what I learnt about online screen production, I learnt about a whole new way of making! The screen capture is totally exclusive to the screen world and is so embedded in modernity that it can’t really be separated from the internet either. Our experiment reminded me of something I’ve been seeing on Facebook lately- stories told completely through text (as if you were one of the texters). While the stories themselves are basic, it’s an incredibly innovative way to tell a story and it made me think about the other possibilities of telling stories through screen capture, beyond just texting. What’s to say you couldn’t make a feature-length film from the perspective of a phone screen?

Making this also really expanded in my mind the idea of publishing pointless content, either as an experiment or because, well, why not? A live stream of a watch ticking. A video of a blank canvas. A timelapse of my dog sleeping. It can be done, so easily. It would be interesting to gauge people’s reactions to pointless content if it was coming up in their news feeds.

My question moving forward is how can we make something that is expanding the possibilities of the internet, but something that isn’t pointless? I want to think about innovation and creation in a time where anything is possible.

Assignment 1: Development

oliviamcdonald on

Online screen production completely transforms the way we think about media and how the audience engages with media artifacts and platforms. The internet has allowed the creation of endless content by giving a traditionally passive audience the ability to create and share with millions of others. Consequently, there is great variety in the qualities and subjects of online screen media.

Online production can closely reflect the qualities of older mediums of production- a web series may follow a linear story, have episodes, and feature relatable or engaging characters just like a television series would. The difference between a television-like web series and a real television series is in the way it is consumed, engaged with and discussed. The distribution of web series (on platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo) allows for a lot more viewer interaction and an easy place for audiences to discuss the series if they wish. However, most web series also have a major difference from television, in that there is no restriction on their length. There is certainly discussion around what length is appropriate for a web series, but at the end of the day, like all qualities of the web series, the length is totally unregulated.

This is a great, and I believe essential, essence of online screen production. It can be anything you want it to be. If you have the resources to write it, film it, craft it, code it, develop it, publish it, then you can. And the world will see it because the world can access it. It is unregulated and endlessly accessible.

I believe the unregulated quality of the internet has multiple consequences. With the accessibility of consuming and sharing, power is given to everyone with an internet connection. Old ways of one to many flows of communication are being dismantled, as Manuel Castells explains in this Technology Review article. Sociopolitical change is becoming easier as people share their stories and voices on the internet, and find others who are fighting the same cause. The recent #MeToo and Times Up movements would have been genuinely impossible without the internet. But with the power of social media, these movements were able to move into a public and international arena that engaged millions of individuals, not just those who are well known enough to have a platform for themselves. 

However, while the unconstrained internet empowers people for the better, it also means that the massive, tangled web of the internet is constantly being expanded. A huge variety of content, and caliber of content, is being added every day. For this reason, I consider the internet to be an abyss that is growing with each passing day. It is an almost incomprehensible mass of content as people feel no limits to what they can publish. In this way, the accessible/unconstrained qualities mean it is increasingly difficult to actually get your content noticed and appreciated amongst the millions of terabytes of average (sometimes terrible, sometimes great) content.

It also means that the future of the internet is unknown. Who knows what new platforms and technology will exist in ten, twenty, fifty years time? I think a lot of the formal qualities of online screen media that we discussed in week one derive from the excitement of endless possibilities. Naturally, as new technology is available, people find new ways to use it and new things to make with it. So are born 360 videos, VR, an endless array of apps, new ways to engage with others, and new ways to share your work with others. I for one cannot wait to see the way traditional past times of storytelling and communicating are changed and evolve with the fluidity of the internet. We’re in for an exciting ride.