Presenting and reflecting.

Presenting is not my strong point. As much as I love to talk, I am a nervous public speaker. Writing the presentation was easy, we have a group of four people so I suggested coming up with four different important talking points that covered the project. As a group we discussed each category and had a joint Google Doc in which we scribed our ideas and notes, which were gradually refined into what I think is a pretty thorough four person speech. If it had have been a written assignment, our 1200 word presentation notes would have absolutely nailed it. As it happened, in the spoken form, it was not as strong. I prefer to speak with only dot points to navigate me through my planned notes, which is risky because it might not come out impressively or even coherently, but as long as I know the knowledge is there, I know I can speak about it. With this project, having discussed it at length with my team many times, I know what I wanted to say but I’m not sure how clearly it was expressed.
There were a few important points that I think could have been emphasised more, they were:
  • When you take superficial online content seriously it’s harmful, but when looked at out of context it is ridiculous and trivial, which is where the comedy element of our story comes in.
  • We want the audience to act and feel as they usually would, as someone wasting time online, traversing the internet through hypertextuality and stalking someone for personal entertainment, humour and sick self indulgent pleasure.
  • The key motivating factor for our audience will be their sense of agency. While they can’t actually manipulate the plot, the audience’s actions and choices within the media platforms will directly provide them with the reward of more information.
  • The story will explore possible damage that being so involved on the internet has on young people, that have been born into the digital age. The superficial and edited nature of the internet and the trivial and ridiculous qualities of online content, can have serious consequences when embraced naively and intensely by inexperienced young people.
As for the other presentations, I think people had the exact same issue as us. They’d written a fantastic passage of writing but it was long in the anxiety of presenting in front of a silent room of (probably rather bored) students and four very academic and stern middle-aged men. As such, the energy that is required to have a really engaging presentation was lacking. However, everyone’s projects sound awesome and it’s really great to see people who seem to be genuinely excited about their projects. While the presentations themselves may not have been amazing, the concepts are super impressive and as are the people talking about them.