Old’s Cool – Project Brief 4: Work in Progress Report #2

Adrian, Cody and I have set out to create a series of comedic satirical videos in the vein of Adult Swim content. I have just gotten over a cold which placed us behind schedule but I have just written a couple of mock advertisements which we will film within the next couple of days. The two ads I wrote centre on a time traveller coming from the year 2017 all the way to the 1980’s to tell a random citizen about the “wonders of the internet and world’s most popular social media website, Facebook”. Playing up the 80’s C-Grade late night television spots, the ad is purposely undercooked with bad editing and a half-baked idea. The premise for the skit does not hold up under much scrutiny, which will make it funnier to the viewer and satirise the 80’s aesthetic.

The centre-piece of our video are the talk show segments which will highly exaggerate motifs and premises common in the era. In aiming for funny content, the crux of these scenes hone in on nonsensical antics to highlight the evolution of the talk show and television as a whole. “Since 1951, when the first TV talk show was aired on American WJZ-TV, this cultural phenomenon has gained an astronomic number of supporters and probably an equally large number of opponents all over the globe” (Piotrowicz, 2013, pg. 609). Beginning as discussion panels focused on the debate over crucial points concerning every facet of American life, it has evolved considerable since then. The genre is so familiar to people from the Western world that the sub-genre of satiric talk shows has taken on a life of its own through programs such as The Eric Andre Show and Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, both of these particular spoof shows aired on Adult Swim. This is just a microcosm of the genre’s evolution as a programming block that only airs once Cartoon Network’s target audience of children between the ages of seven and fifteen have gone to sleep, hosts programs with dedicated audiences based on a premise which is making fun of another genre.

Audiences have evolved from the mindset established by old media principles. I explored this development during Project Brief 2 as I researched how media has narrowed its focus to examine its audience as individuals instead of a single minded mass of consumers. This is why we wanted to include a segment of our project focusing on how the past would view the concept of online social media applications such as Facebook and Twitter. One of the most intriguing elements of an interactive social media application “is the degree to which such environments allow individual user feedback to affect and be incorporated into the stream of presented information” (Southwell & Lee, 2004, pg. 645). With our final project, Adrian, Cody and I have written sketches that will explore these ideas, while also being entirely ridiculous.

 

Bibliography

Piotrowicz, Magdalena (2013) ‘American TV Talk Shows as Sicko Circuses of the 21st Century, International Journal of Arts & Sciences, vol. 6(3), pp. 609-625

Southwell, Brian & Lee, Mira (2004) ‘A Pitfall of New Media? User Controls Exacerbate Editing Effects on Memory’, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, vol. 81(3), pp. 643 – 656

 

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.