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Without a doubt in my mind, the initiation posts have been the hardest posts to write. For broad topics such as creativity in media studies, it’s difficult to come up with ways to link it to things that haven’t already been discussed in class. So for the past few days I’ve been thinking, “What the heck can I write about that hasn’t been talked about yet?”. Now this might be pushing it, but I think I managed to squeeze out an idea.
Blogging.
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In this weeks workshop, we talked about the readings by David Gauntlett regarding creativity and digital media – talking about a change in the way we think about media studies. Dubbed “media studies 2.0”, this new form of media studies encourages creativity and making, rather than the old model where theoretical studies is more prevalent. My previous post talks a bit about this change, so go ahead and read up on it if you haven’t already (it’s freee~).
So what kind of affects will this shift impose? How will it change your day-to-day life? Well, as our class discussed in huge detail, we are already in the process of this shift, and it’s called social media. First of all, let me get this straight. You don’t need to be a media practitioner to create media. Almost every single one of us create media in some way or form. Posting a Facebook status, uploading on Snapchat, or even posting a new photo on Instagram are all forms of media creation.
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As a result of the Labour day, this week lectorial was cancelled (Yay!). As a result, I’ll only be speaking about this weeks readings. This weeks set of readings by David Gauntlett, all followed a pretty central theme. Gauntlett proposes a possible shift in the way we think of media from an industry perspective, and how a change can benefit the industry in the future. At least, I think that’s what he was saying – let me explain.
Before I begin, let me preface this by saying that this post is a post relating to the reading of week two, while also being an initiative post; where I relate an idea to media that I have encountered.
To summarise, the reading for week two was a comic about comics. And it was by far one of my favourite readings I’ve encountered so far. Let me explain. The reading explained the importance between the spaces of the frames within a comic. It discussed how we – as an audience, have an active role to play while reading a comic, as we commit closure to make a link between the frames within a comic. Closure is described as “observing the parts but perceiving the whole”.
Credit – Scott McCloud “Blood in the Gutter”
The workshop for week two had quite a few interesting things in store for me. If you haven’t seen my previous post, I showcased my final ‘creative self-portrait’ with all the components of each medium. In this weeks workshop, we had to present it – but in an unorthodox way. Instead of presenting to the entire class, we split-off into small groups. Within each group, every person would take turns presenting their work.
The listeners of the group would then have to provide their feedback to the presenter, so that they could better evaluate their work. But this is where it became ‘unorthodox’. Instead of each person saying what they really thought about the work presented to them, each person represented a ‘hat’ from the ‘six thinking hat’ system. If you aren’t familiar with this system – simply put, it’s a tool used for group discussions that help to give feedback from multiple perspectives. Each hat represented a different perspective. We used four out of the six hats, which goes as follows:
If you’ve kept up with my blog, you’ll understand what my title is referring to. If you haven’t, let me briefly summarise.
The ‘creative self-portrait’ was our first project for our bachelor of communication course. The self-portrait comprises of different mediums of media (image, video, audio and text) that represent one’s identity. How we chose to represent ourselves was completely up to us and our creative imaginations (hence the ‘creative’ part). So without further ado, here is my creative self-portrait.
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Today’s lectorial covered two topics of interest. First of all we covered the importance of editing. We learned how the most minute changes can greatly affect the result. I will cover this topic in a later blog post, sometime during this week.
What I want to discuss today is the second topic; the importance of media. Today’s class began with a very important question – what is media? Upon hearing this question, I was actually stumped. You would think that a student undergoing a media course would know what falls under the umbrella of ‘media’. However, I found myself struggling to give a simple definition of the term ‘media’. As individuals, we were told to come up with the first five things that we think of when we hear the word ‘media’. As I did with a similar task that we did in the first lectorial, I ended up with less answers as was instructed. Oops. As a class, we discussed the different types of media and its effects on its audiences. As I jotted down the answers of the other students, my list of three media related things soon turned into twenty. By the end of it, one thing was made certain by this activity. Media is everywhere.
As my first week of uni has come to an end, there is one word that is been constantly repeated in both my media and cinema studies classes to the point where I can’t think of anything but that single word, and that word, ladies and gentlemen is “blog”.
Blog. Blog. Blog. Blog.
It’s a weird word isn’t it? Keep saying it over and over again and eventually you’ll get to a point where you’ll doubt it’s validity as an English word. Such a short simple, 4-lettered word, and yet, it holds so much value for students undergoing this course. Our blog, is the basis of which our entire university results are based on. So it’s unsurprising how much our lecturers have emphasised the term. So much so, that our first reading was based on the importance of blogging, and why our entire curriculum is centred around blogging.
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Hey Reza,
You still find that meme funny?
If you’re reading this, either two of the possible outcomes I could think of has happened:
If it’s the former – go away. If it’s the latter – continue to read.
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On Wednesday this week (02/03/2016 for those reading this at a later date), I had my first workshop for media one. As all first classes usually go, we were all introduced to one another and also engaged in activities that made us feel just that little bit more comfortable around each other. We were also tasked with an interesting; but spontaneous, mission – to capture a ‘Melbourne moment’ in 10 minutes. The first thought that ran through my head was, “what the hell is a Melbourne moment?”. Continue reading
