Institutions/Audiences/Texts/Mediums/Technologies

In our tutorial yesterday, we looked at each group’s second draft for project brief 4. It was great to finally see what everyone else had been working on after being so caught up in our own work. A couple of the artefacts that really stood out to me were the following:

Elise and Jack

  • Institutions
  • Gave a clear explanation of what an institution was, then honed in on their topic of classification (connecting to the classification board of Australia)
  • Presented their work as a short 10 minute film explaining the intricacies of the classification system
    • How it works
    • What the different ratings are
    • Challenges facing film-makers today
  • I thought this was a very well executed media artefact that did well integrating academic information, whilst also being creative and interesting

Maggie, Jac and Dusty

  • Audiences
  • Focused on how audiences now interact with the content they watch, and the effect this then has on the media content produced
  • Presented their work in the form of a website, but also created Youtube videos to demonstrate linking to other sources and created an app to view the website easily from a mobile device
    • I thought these ideas were particularly creative because they were highly relevant to their content
    • Teaching about interactivity by creating something interactive

I also liked Gloria, Patrick and Bianca’s work. They created a sound recording with information and interviews with experts in their topic. It was the first assignment presented as a sound recording, and it really changed the way we experienced the artefact, requiring more attention because there was no visual component. Though this work still needed to be edited, I thought it was a really interesting response to the brief.

Blog O’Clock

Week 12 Lectorial:

Watching Valorie Curry’s short film, Kara, I was shocked by the sympathy I felt for the machine who had become a girl in front of my eyes. Even though I knew full well that a) she had been developed as a piece of technology and b) she was merely a creation in a film, not real life, when I saw what looked like a human, my response was to think of her as a human. 

I recognise that technology has not yet developed to the extent portrayed in the short film, and also that there are many breakthroughs that we have yet to learn about. However, at the end of the day, I think that humans are more intelligent than machines. I don’t mean that we can do all the computation that machines can, nor can we have 10 tabs open and running in our minds at the same time or speak every conceivable language, but humans are capable of thinking for themselves; machines are not.

If technology humans have developed is clever, it’s because somebody had the idea, the initiative, the tools and the intellect to bring that idea “to life” (no Kara pun intended). What may at face value seem like a machine’s intuition cannot possibly be so. 

Machines of every kind need to be programmed in some way, thus building the options we will then see when we use said technology. I think there is a risk that humans are coming to rely too heavily on technology and this begs the question of how much we are thinking for ourselves. This is the real danger; relying on technology that does not have the capacity to think for us, and losing our own capacity to create and use initiative.

Week 12: Media Materialism

  1.  Technology
    1. Role of human body – technology, functional tool
  2. Technique
    1. Things are taught to us – social expectations and how we react to them, based on our values and upbringing
  3. Culture
    1. Identifying subgroups within population
    2. The world as culture, humankind
    3. Art, theatre, cinema: creative expression

There are contradictions between the above three features of media materialism, each of which are ever-changing and unpredictable. The culture industry, for one, is dictated by people’s own personal tastes and incorporates aspects of human life, as well as design and manufacturing.

“Culture is something that we do, but it is also something that we are.”

  • Technological determinism vs. social constructivism
    • Essential question: Does technology dictate culture or do we control how technology progresses?
    • No matter the innovation, it’s still up to us how we control the use and regulation of technology
    • This view accounts for the humanness in creation and innovation
    • “You’re only human” – development is a process

Examples of Technology:

  • Walkman – create our own soubdtrack, cut out outside sound cues of the world, changed the way we engaged with the world
  • Dziga Vertov believed the camera is a natural extension of the eye and brain, and thus the only way to capture the transactions of life
  • Valorie Curry – Kara

Thinking about the ….

  • Holocene (geological period)
  • Anthropocene – the age of humans
    • Largely the damage (destruction of the planet) is already done
    • Molecular red: theory for the anthropocene – McKenzie Wark
    • In modern media there is an obsession with resources and the end of the world (at least as we know it)
      • Dystopian societies, preparing for an apocalypse

Institutions

Institutions are organising structures of society that deal with social, cultural, political and economic relations, as well as the principles, values and rules that underly these relations. They cannot simply be ideas; they need to have a form (or a currency of some sort). Examples include the police, city council local government, education and journalism.

Marriage as a Social Institution:

  • Expectations
    • Values (e.g. monogamy)
    • Rituals – exchanging vows
    • Symbols – rings
    • Rights
    • Superstitions – unlucky to see the bride in her dress before the wedding
  • Legal framework/regulatory
  • Meta-institutional frame
  • Widely accepted practice
  • Cultural ‘rules’
  • Social recognition

Media institutions:

  • are enduring
  • regulate and structure activities
  • are ‘collectivist’
  • develop working practices
  • employees and people associated are expected to share values
    • e.g. sports journalist fired for his comments on ANZAC day
    • professionalisation and accreditation
    • qualifications that are necessary to be regarded in a profession
  • public is aware of the status

Institutional Characteristics:

  • Facebook
    • Way of life
    • Ubiquity/Interconnectedness – other apps will ask if you want to “share”
      • Raises the question of privacy
    • Advertisements from other things you have looked at on the internet show up on Facebook
    • Privately-owned
    • Differentiation between real life and the life people see on Facebook
      • Present a certain portrayal of yourself
  • Newscorp
    • POWER
      • Almost a monopoly
      • Channels
    • Status
    • Fair? Balanced?
      • Still needs to adhere to the standards of journalism
    • Vertically and horizontally integrated
    • Journalistic conventions
    • Code of ethics on their website – question the extent to which this is adhered to
    • Agenda-setting/framing
  • Google
    • Innovation
    • Social conscience
      • Do no evil
    • Mission: Organise the world’s information and make it useable and useful
    • Accessibility – global reach
    • Contemporariness
    • Google as…
      • a culture
      • a verb
        • brand connected to a way of doing things
      • googol – a number with 100 zeros
  • Community Media
    • Not-for-profit
    • Lo-fi filming
    • Lack of advertising – commercial aspect much smaller, if it exists at all
    • Content
      • Local focus
      • Passion-driven
      • Experimentation – taking risks
    • Diversity
    • Governance/regulation (or lack thereof)

Work Attachment

Notes about Media work attachment (spoken about in week 10 lectorial)

  • Minimum 1500-word report but often much longer
    • Serves to demonstrate learning experience through the attachment
  • Reflections in google drive – not on the blog or in any other public place
  • Best to get as much experience as possible while RMIT has you insured
  • Minimum 80 hours
    • Must be approved by Paul Ritchard
    • Then fill in form about attachment

Previous internships:

  • Australian Chamber of Commerce – events and communications team
  • Newspaper
    • Australian Financial Review
    • Shanghai Daily

Goals for future internships/work attachments:

  • Newspapers – The Age, the Herald Sun
  • Marketing & communications team – National Australia Bank, Telstra
  • Advertising agency

I’m so excited that this is a part of the degree and I can’t wait to start searching for opportunities!

“We Stand on the Shoulders of Giants”

According to Everything is a Remix: Part 2…

  • 74/100 films are remakes, adaptations, sequels of existing films
  • We as a society like the familiar
  • “The old into the new is Hollywood’s greatest talent”
  • Films are based on theme park rides, blogs, books and more
    • Films are also built on other films
    • Then told, retold, subverted, referenced
  • “Original” films are not really original
    • Most are genre films with standard templates
    • They also fit into sub-genres that have even more specific elements
  • Certain films reshape pop culture, but that still doesn’t make them original
    • e.g. Star Wars is very imaginative but most of the individual elements are sampled from elsewhere
  • “Creation requires influence”
    • e.g. influence from our lives and the lives of others

This short analytical film was one of our “readings” for week 11 of this course. Not only that, but it is highly relevant to the work my group is doing for our fourth project brief. Our focus is on adaptations and the concept that nothing is original changes the way we look at particular films, as well as other adaptations in other mediums. Our focus is on Romeo and Juliet, one of the most commonly adapted stories of all time. Everything is a Remix encouraged me to think about the differences between relying on an “original” as a source for the plot, characters and thematic elements of a story, as opposed to sampling specific sequences or features from a number of works for a particular purpose or effect. I think that the difference between a remix and an adaptation is that an adaptation more closely relies on its original as a template, whereas remixes tend to take more chances, experimenting with how different elements could be manipulated and to what effect.

“Audience”

Personally, when I am working I sometimes get so caught up in what I’m creating that I forget that others will eventually see and (hopefully) enjoy my work. In my final two years of school particularly, I learnt the importance of keeping the audience at the forefront. At the end of the day, my ideas and intentions for my work mean nothing if I fail to clearly convey that to the receiver, or “audience”.

Who cares about audiences?

  • Advertisers
  • Commercial broadcasters, cable networks, etc.
  • Government policy makers – licensing accountability, censorship
  • Social scientists/psychologists, cultural theorists/media scholars – how media affects people in their daily lives

The target audience may completely change the content, the medium and the platforms used by advertising companies to sell a product.

Changing conceptions of audiences and consumers:

  • Broadcast to post-broadcast age
    • Characteristics of a post-broadcast era – changes in aesthetic sensibilities, audience practices, television institutions, technologies of production, distribution and consumption (and how to use them)
    • Rise in network culture
    • How we consume media – all around us, inescapable in the modern world
  • From citizens to consumers

“There are in fact no masses; there are only ways of seeing people as masses… a way of seeing people which has become characteristic of our kind of society… [a way of seeing that] has been capitalised for the purse of cultural or political exploitation.” 

We need to be conscious of how we position ourselves – cannot simply say, “I am better than you” because we all fall under the category of “the masses”.

Theorising the ‘active audience’:

  • Audience’s intelligence recognised by creators
  • Fans and engagement – they contribute in some way
    • Binge-watching television shows (becomes an obsession)
    • Creation of fandoms – keep up with every action of a particular person/band
    • Giving yourself over to the text by immersing yourself in another world and forming connections with characters
  • Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model (1980)
    • Communication is a gamble
    • Make short film – code mise en scene, characters etc. hoping audience will understand meaning – hoping they will interpret the same way as it was intended
    • Audience has to recognise, make sense of (by assembling) – happens subconsciously

Interpellation: the process by which individuals/readers are “hailed” (prompted by a text to recognise themselves as being a subject that belongs in a role) – Louis Althusser

Components of the Broadcast ratings convention

  • Exposure is the key element – how many people see an advertisement (challenge)
  • Can’t measure engagement after seeing advertising (limitation)
  • Accuracy of measuring – intensified in recent years but this is not a new issue (challenge)

Taste

  • “We are seduced by our own preferences; our likes and dislikes”
  • Different people like and dislike different things – broad range
  • Not inherent (not born with taste) – it is a result of what we grow up with

Without an audience, a work cannot be recognised and will not spark the action it intends to. Research into a target audience is also increasingly important, as we now live in such a world that the consumer decides what they want and companies deliver, as opposed to the other way around.

Week 5 Lectorial – ‘Successful’ Reading

In our week 5 lectorial, we spoke about successful reading as well as how to practically approach our third project brief (and some things to keep in mind).

I’m going to try to make use of the following tips to help me get through all my readings at university, and particularly the challenging ones.

  • Read the abstract first (if there is one), paying close attention, as this outlines what the reading will be about
  • Skim read the body of the text to figure out the main idea of the writing and become familiar with the writing style and structure
  • Read introduction and conclusion to clarify the overall purpose of the text
  • Think about the argument the writer is making so that things make sense as you read
  • Don’t be overwhelmed by a lot of text; look for key sentences and go for there
  • Don’t get stuck on terms you don’t know – make a note to look it up and come back to it later
  • Highlight and annotate as you go
  • When you finish reading, write a brief summary of the main ideas of the text for quick reference
    • Look for a kernel that sums up the main point of the text
    • Also evaluate the text in your mind, thinking about the strengths/limitations and the scope of the reading
  • Think about the relevance of the text for your purpose (e.g. background reading, inspiration, developing a creative or technical skill)

In terms of things to remember for project brief 3, I made the following list:

  • Release forms signed by participants
  • Original and Found Footage
    • Found footage: pre-existing footage found and appropriated in an original way that the original creator
  • Editing
    • Make use of cutaway shots – keep the audience interested
    • Voiceovers
    • Interview – filmed from multiple angles
    • Fast cuts and repetition
    • Think about putting effects on videos (e.g. colour washes to create a certain mood, sense of ageing/time to create a sense of reminiscence)
    • Play with camera focus – same thing from different angles
    • Mood music behind a person speaking – can lift what they are saying