For this weeks tutorial, we were put into our groups of three and began to look properly at the Project Brief four. The project asks us to create a 7-8 minutes long audio piece based around the theme of the semester being “Attention”. We can choose a topic to tie attention into, which may help us to break down how attention works and can be moulded or captured in some way.

As a group we began to brainstorm and thought that a lot of our attention is often consumed by social media. It has a naturally fast pace in terms of updating our feeds, it is remarkable in maintaining our attention due to the curated material we are sent and for the most part the social action of uploading photographs or videos/ tagging other people is very enticing. As we began to look more at Facebook, we realised it would be a better idea to look at one aspect, considering it can be pretty vast in its content and discussion. Eventually, we came to the idea of how Facebook news reporting has changed and how we understand news events through the people that report on them, which can have a tendency to differ depending on who you read. This felt like a really interesting idea as it has become a quite prevalent topic in today’s society and for the new generation’s this is the norm of how they receive and learn about the news.

From an assessment point of view, we felt that it would be fairly easy to find academic material on Facebook, as well as the digital change in news reporting and news marketing. There was also some opportunity to find examples of news marketing or click bait through Politics in the US. Trump’s presidency has caused much media attention, creating a build up of not particularly important news, but rather social commentary, and this remains acceptable due to the shift in priority from communicating events to an almost gossip like format.

With our ideas in mind we created our contract and decided on what our strength’s weaknesses and threats were.

The second half of the tutorial was dedicated to looking at the equipment we would be using (The H2n recorder) and how to make sure we got the most out of it during the recording phase of our audio. Please see my very messy notes 🙂