Old’s Cool – Project Brief 4: Work in Progress Report #1
Throughout the semester, I have discovered an interest in the impact social media has had on the evolution of old media. My first foray was during project brief two when I turned my attention to content creators of social media, which is pretty much anyone with a smart phone nowadays. There are countless ways social media is utilised by the millennial generation but it is primarily a time filler. With the push of a button, an endless stream of new entertainment and information is at the user’s disposal, right in the palm of their hand. This has caused attention spans to shorten and for the impact of media artefacts to lessen. With video aggregators like YouTube and social media applications such as Facebook and Instagram providing users with an endless stream of content, the value of each piece of media seems (to me at least) rather fleeting. What intrigues me about this dynamic is that the fleeting nature of online creations has changed the way people create videos and photographs.
For project brief two, I recorded my roommate Joshua as he created something to post to his social media account of choice, Snapchat. His reasoning behind using this app the most was because it allowed him to experiment and share content with the people he chooses. He creates media to entertain specific people, each photo and video he makes has a different audience in mind. Media has always been a way for creators to entertain others. Old media has the legacy of establishing principles for film and photography that are prevalent today, but the sudden bloom of online sharing has taken these principles and given them to everyone. Anyone with a phone in their pocket can create something for an audience, small or big.
A way to examine this change is to look at the evolution of marketing and advertising practices. Traditional media advertising centred on one-way communication, targeting their audience as a single mass of consumers. The aim was to repeat the brand message and persuade an audience to take some desired action in relation to the service or product.
On the other side of the spectrum is new media marketing, a one-one-one form of advertising that considers its customers as individuals in a crowd. Rather than interrupting a conversation with broad message, new media advertising invites an individual to join a conversation, creating or joining a community. Social media is based on creating and contributing to various online communities and I would like to explore this for project brief four.
I have joined a group with Adrian and Cody who had the idea to create an eighties style video, using the old media style of filmmaking to discuss new media principles. This is the simply the foundation of our project and we will evolve it in the coming weeks. I want to showcase the evolution of old media as it has been adapted by new media online communities and remixing my ideas with my group will provide an interesting final product.
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