Over the last few days we have spent some time working on our Facebook page and making some posts that ask our audience to comment their first impressions and/or complete the quiz. Early indications suggest that our audience has been drawn to the quiz element of the project as opposed to commenting on our chosen album cover. While we have had a few responses to our chosen album cover, many of these have been through asking specific people to comment, rather than people choosing to do so on their own accord. While these comments have not come about quite as naturally as I would have hoped, the reactions that people have had to our chosen album artwork have been interesting and relatively unique to each other, meaning we should have some good ideas to work with for our final product.
The way that I used the word react, and the overall use of the word react when speaking about people responding to something in an online form is interesting to think about. In the article Globalisation of the Privatised Self-Image: The reaction video and its attention economy on Youtube from the Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia (2015), author Yeran Kim discusses the new phenomenon of reaction videos. Reaction videos involve audience members watching or engaging with something, and filming themselves throughout this engagement to capture their emotions and ‘reactions’ to what they see. The authors of the piece make an interesting point surrounding the use of the word ‘reaction’ or ‘reactive’, pointing out the issues with calling these videos reactive, as the audience is actually actively creating content:
“The role of reactors in reaction videos, in fact, is doubled: in terms of interpretative position, a reactor takes the reactive position of appreciating the ready-made visual product, but, in terms of productive action, the reactor is a “produser” (Bird 2011; Bruns 2008) that not only consumes ready-made media products but also makes and distributes self-reactive images.” (Kim 2015, p. 440) While our audiences are not specifically creating videos, they are viewing media material that we are posting and writing out their reactions to it, so our audience is therefore creating reactions by looking at content we posted, similarly to what is suggested in the article.
Media studies throughout the years have looked at audiences in two ways, as being either active or passive, or proactive and reactive. Some of the earliest theories of media have suggested that audiences are passive, and suggests that media is ‘closed’. In 1938, Orson Welles directed the dramatisation of HG Wells’ ‘War of the Worlds’, which was set up as a news bulletin and broadcast on the radio to a high volume of listeners. Brett Lamb of Lesson Bucket notes that, due to the way the broadcast was set up, ‘viewers who tuned in late became convinced that Earth was actually being invaded by martians.’ Thinking in Fragments has shown me how far we have come with media since then, and how allowing audiences to interact and contribute to media has allowed for this change and for audiences to be so active. While our audience could be labelled as reactive due to their reactions to our Facebook posts, they truly are active and involved in interacting openly with our work.
While I wasn’t totally sure that people would respond to the quiz, due to the fact that it did involve 12 questions that may seem like a big commitment for some people, I wasn’t exactly surprised either. Buzzfeed quizzes have risen in popularity over time, while a number of other game-style projects have also been well-received by audiences. ‘Project Architeuthis’ is the first alternate reality game (ARG) ever launched by a branch of U.S. Armed Forces’ (pp. 1). Marketed through Facebook, the game involves a number of different puzzles for the viewer to move through, with the aim that the US Armed forces would be able ‘to locate the ideal candidates for Cryptology’ (pp. 2). The game was the multi-platform campaign Shorty Award winner, and not only worked as an important piece of advertising, but also as an engaging piece of online screen media.
The piece is also interesting in the way that, while it is a fictional piece, it looks for real skills within the users, and simulates situations that will test real skills. While I am starting to feel like a broken record with my talks about fictional vs non-fictional pieces, it is something that constantly seems to keep coming up throughout my work in this subject. Through my discoveries in this course, I felt as though I would learn more about the distinctions between fiction and non-fiction pieces. Instead, each project has tangled up the definitions more and more. The piece we are in the midst of creating uses the real-life platforms of Facebook and Wix to speak to a real audience about their real thoughts, with a supplementary quiz that asks questions about real things. Despite this, the pieces we are recreating aren’t actually real, they are representations of our audiences thoughts.
As we near the end of the semester, my thoughts about online screen media and the characteristics of it are becoming more refined. In terms of fiction vs non-fiction, I have discovered that when it comes to online screen media, pieces do not necessarily need to be either fictional or non-fictional. Online screen media is much more experimental when compared to other forms, with less regulation around it. Because of this, works can fall into a number of categories, rather than having clear distinctions. The next thing we must turn to in order to finish our piece is the final element of our project, the ‘your first impressions video’, with many decisions still needing to be made on the way this will be completed.
Research
Academic: Kim, Y 2015, ‘Globalisation of the Privatised Self-Image: The reaction video and its attention economy on Youtube’, Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia, edited by: Hjorth, L and Khoo, O, Taylor and Francis, pp. 439-440
Project: Campbell Ewald, L n.d, Project Architeuthis, Client: US Navy, Shorty Awards website, viewed 20 May 2018, < http://shortyawards.com/7th/project-architeuthis >