Over the past few weeks, we have been working hard to put together a very creative and informative media artefact. Weeks ago we were randomly put into groups of 2 or 3, and lucky for me, I got placed with Alaine and Jess. The three of us have worked extremely well together on our topic of ‘institutions’ The project brief was very broad, and we struggled at first to get our heads around exactly what we were supposed to produce. One thing this project taught me was that, University certainly doesn’t spoon food information or instructions to you, unlike high school. However, we were quick to overcome the uncertainty, and got to work.

We started by jotting down ideas and views regarding different media institutions, and how they contradict each other. From this we decided to focus on modern vs traditional media outlets, or to be more specific, online vs print media. We all agreed that social media allowed for freedom of speech, and that traditional media is often one sided as the government control what is included in the final edit. We also wanted to include elements that would be entertaining such as videos, images etc. Alaine holds strong views (hatred) for Rupert Murdoch haha! So she wanted to find a video interview of him that we could manipulate. I thought it was a great idea but difficult to do. Nevertheless, we managed to pull together a 40 second, completely edited video of Murdoch talking rubbish. The idea of this was to show how we can control his words, just like the way he controlled print media once upon a time.

Along with this video, we created a more serious one where we interview Philip Dearman, head of Prof Comm at RMIT. We asked him questions regarding his stance on modern vs traditional media and he supplied us with great insights. We also received written feedback from Hannah Francis, who is a technology reporter at The Age. Both these professionals in the industry really helped strengthen our project. We decided the most effective way to gather as many pieces of information was to delegate different tasks. My contribution to the project was multiple, however they weren’t huge tasks. Whereas Alaine and Jess took on roles that required slightly longer attention. For example, I wrote an opinion piece that was ‘pro-social media’, I also created a media timeline and researched Instagram’s top hashtags. Jess worked on making our webpage look amazing as she had blogging experience, she also put together and edited the videos. Alaine took care of the bibliographies and did lots of research to make them perfect.

Overall, I’m extremely impressed with the way we have all worked together. I’m even more impressed with the final outcome, our website looks amazing. It also contains relevant and organised information that contributes to our project. Our website is called ‘Institution Revolution’ (came up with that one myself haha). I’ve had such a great time working with Jess and Alaine, and I hope I’ll see them in some classes next semester, they have done such an amazing job.

http://institution-revolution.tumblr.com/