Ruby's Critical Analysis

Ruby Ong Elepano – 10445820

Project Title: Citizen Journalist Project Ruby – The impact of Technology

Sypnosis:

A personal video blog reporting about the impact technology has in the lives of people with four technological examples.

Initial Aims for the Project:

I aimed to produce a personal video blog, with a ‘live’ style of reporting, with similarity to how a news show or segment would look like. This illustrates the topic of Citizen Journalism, which allows citizens to be a (re)source of journalism to the masses, in the mass media. The participation of citizens in this area provides information that is easily accessible, portrays perspectives from the ‘other’ side, meaning the citizen themselves and may perhaps be biased. My blog was to be a video blog about how technology impacts the lives of people in the 21st century and it came from my perspective and personal experience. The project was aimed to focus on particular types of technology commonly used by individuals, even though there are many varieties of other technological gadgets around. Thus, aiming to just focus on Electronic Books, Computers, Mobile Phones and Portable Gaming Consoles, I reported what I thought would be relevant to the subject topic, utilising myself as the presenter for my video blog.

Ideas brought and explored into the project:

Upon deciding that technology and its impact on people’s lives were going to be my focus, I researched different types of technology that people frequently use. Electronic Books, Computers, Mobile Phones and Portable Gaming Consoles were the top choices because not everyone, for example has a portable music player, even then, their laptop could do the job, just as well. Students as well as working adults were taken into consideration as to what technological machines were used very often and provided them with information, entertainment and communication with other people. I filmed my footage in such a way, that it would be obvious that a citizen was reporting information to the masses.

Problems encountered and solution:

In producing my video blog I encountered several problems such as copyright issues, technical hitches, lack of information and lack of resources. With my initial idea for the project of doing a video blog about the Harry Potter phenomenon being scrapped because of copyright issues, I decided to take a different approach with technology and how it impacted the lives of people in today’s society. That would have been more feasible as a resource myself with the devices I had reported about, that issue was solved. I was also unable to use songs for fear of copyright infringement, so I decided to use music clips provided in iMovie HD because they had a music file of news broadcasting quality and purpose.

Technical hitches involved not having Quicktime Pro in my computer at home, not being used to iMovie HD and this caused inconvenience because I had to go to the Multimedia Centre to edit my video. Even then, other students had booked the computes and I had to wait my turn for quite some time, even for days. Manipulating images in my video proved to be daunting as I had intended to have an image super imposed next to me in my footage, similar to what would be seen in a news segment on television. I researched about how I could achieve that effect and even asked the Multimedia Centre staff for information, but the method as to how to accomplish that effect still eludes me.

Also, without feedback from our unit coordinator, after my first and second video and text posts, I was not sure how my progress was going and what improvements could I have done to my video blog project and felt worried. I decided to continue and just do the best I could, according to my original plan and tried to incorporate something more technically and content-wise in my third and fourth video and text posts.

The idea for me to have interviews with people and have the footage as segments in my video, that used the technology I was going to explore for my video blog, had to be abandoned. This was because there was a lack of willing participants and meeting times were often cancelled and it became increasingly difficult to meet with them to get their views about the said devices. I was able to acquire a Playstation Portable through a friend to use for my project, along with my personal Nintendo DS Lite.

The location where I wanted to film was also limited because I wanted to have a clear background with which my location could remain anonymous and that if I was able to have an image super imposed in the background, it would have served its purpose.

Conclusion, examining what I would have done differently next time and comment on future directions to explore:

I would have liked to have been able to explore other topics, without the fear of copyright issues, as this was an academic project with no commercial value. It would have been beneficial to have links, on how to use any software recommended to us for the use of this video blog project. As a Windows Operating System (OS) user, it would have helped if links on how to use iMovie HD was provided. I would have instead used a different program, if I was familiar with any, to edit my videos. Instead of a News style of blogging, I would have liked to have been able to take a more informal approach when filming.

This experience with video blogging has expanded my ability and knowledge to communicate with the masses and has given me new ways with which I could explore showing people ideas. The exchange of perspectives and videos in this unit has been one of great knowledge. In all, I have greatly enjoyed this unit and I thank everyone who had taken the time to watch my videos and read my words.

(References for my project are in my blog posts.)