after digital journalism

The presentation for our project did not go as well as myself and my group, which was made up with John Gillman and Darragh Cole and myself, had hoped. While it wasn't the worst it definitely had some shortcomings. This assignment was different in that instead of showing our research in person we had to instead make a video of it. I know our video wasn't the best but in fairness it was very last minute as my group was formed during the week before submission, so we only had a few days to make it. When we formed our group decided to do a fake news report for our video for digital media as our methodology assignment, it would be about a car crash on the M50 to Blanchardstown, we also learned from our lecturer Shawn that we had to use one of the tools he gave us so we decided to use StoryMapJS and research all the car crashes and incidents that had happened on the M50 in the last few years, I feel we did pretty well with that since it only took us a day. However, we still had a few problems. After we had submitted it one of the team members suggested that we should add music to the video, so we had to edit the video again and then re submit it.

Another thing different about this presentation was instead of the lecturer asking us what we had thought we earned as a mark, this time the system was that everyone in the class reviewed each video and rated each different aspect of each video. However like I said before at the start are video wasn't the best but it certainly wasn't the worst so I hope we achieved a pass mark at the very least and I feel that I have learned what to do next time when we have to make a video if we have to do one for another assignment in the future I also learned how impotent a team is because I would never have been able to complete this project by myself. I only just learned the basic about editing and I did not know how to edit music or clips into the reports because those where already given to me to use, so this has been a learning experience.

Brief on digital journalism

I learned a lot about digital journalism and about how social media has affected journalism and the news industry. Digital journalism, also known as online journalism, is a contemporary form of journalism where editorial content is distributed via the Internet, as opposed to publishing via print or broadcast. For the most part it has helped journalism by increasing it’s distribution worldwide, people no longer have to buy a newspaper to find out what's going on in the world now they just have to look at their phones or computers to find out. Some news organizations try to resist social media because they find a drop in their circulation which has resulted in a loss of jobs while some embrace it with many having their own websites, news organizations formed recently like for example Buzz Feed know how to use social media and they use it to their advantage to spread their stories. Social media has also become a valuable research tool, whenever a person is in the news, Facebook or other social networks are a ready source of images, no longer needing the persons loved one to offer a picture. In a way a blogger could also be considered journalist, albeit unqualified. However social media has caused a few problems one being there is too much news, and it can be difficult for people to figure out the veracity of the news they see on social media. The readers will start to wonder which news organization they should trust especially when two news company's take different sides of a story. According to my research in 2014 the Irish Social Journalism Survey published the statistic that 64% of Irish journalists reported that information on social media could not be trusted. News publishers have lost control over distribution. Social media and other platforms have taken over the role of the publishers and now the news is now being filtered through algorithms.

As part of the research for our project I  learned how many crashes have happened on the M50, I learned that the M50 motorway in Dublin has been the scene of more than 50 collisions a month over the past year and a half, with 962 crashes occuring between 2019 and 2018 according to newly released figures. One example being a crash on the M50 near Clondalkin involving two cars and a truck on the 2nd of December 2019 or the incident that took place on January in 2019 when a women who will remain anonymous was decapitated during a car crash near Nangor road and instead of helping some people just started recording the incident to later upload onto social media.

I feel myself and my group did a good job gathering all this information especially if you consider the fact that the decision to create a map of past car crashes was last minute and we did it in a day, however I don't have my hopes up because we only had a week left to make the actual video. It has made me realise just how different the News and journalism was before the internet. It required a lot more work and a lot more research. I hope I can learn from any mistakes we might have made while doing the project. This has also shown me how valuable a team is, I could never have managed this on my own and, I think, the project would certainly have failed without them. 

digital journalism

When I was choosing the subject for our assignment my first choice was mapping the next thing I needed to do was find a group to work with but I couldn't because they were either doing a different type of project or in a full group of three already I could have tried to make a team with people outside group 1 but I thought it would be more appropriate if we were all attending the same class. It took me a week before I decided to change to digital journalism but by then everyone already had a team made up so I had no other option but to form a team with a person named John Gillman who is not in my group, we decided that we would do a video on a car crash. Then a week before the submission deadline we managed to get a third member for our group named Darragh Cole who was incredible at editing, so we decided he could do the editing for the video we also decided to follow his idea of showing the research we had on car crashes that have happened on the M50 in the last few years with the use of an interactive map. However our first try at making the video did not go well as we had hoped the scripts for the news report needed some changing and we also had to find a room to do the video in as well as something to operate as green screen, we also had difficulty recording the last scene of the news report. When we tried again the next day, we were a bit more prepared and knew what to do. We decided to scrap the green screen idea and work without it we also used a tablet to record the material for the video this time instead of a phone. However, I am not expecting a perfect score on account of all this being last minute.

memes after

While the presentation did not go as well as myself and the rest of my group had hoped but we did get a pass, and it went so much better than my last one, as this time my group which was made up of myself, Bernard Mac Donagh, Aleksander Smyczynski and Godwill Ndifor, actually used power point and slides to show the project we did for this  culture assignment and unlike our last assignment we didn't split the work. We all made a meme and we all did our own research on all the different type of meme and their history. We combined our efforts and attempted to simplify it for the presentation. However, the lecturer observed that our slides for the presentation were a little too wordy, and that we should simplify it with bullet points next time. We also had a problem with the audio so we couldn't show the videos that we had linked to our project. The material for the research was not difficult to find except for when it came to the African memes, so we decided to change it to memes about Area 51 instead or, more accurately, the storming of Area 51 meme and even then these memes were mostly about how it was going to fail miserably.  This material was much easier to find, and we learned a lot about Area 51 for example it was built during the cold war but it was not until 2013 that it  officially a base became for the CIA.  Also while we were researching the slice of life memes ended up becoming memes about society and about social outcasts in general. 

We also had to read from the slides we made a few times because we had  forgotten what we had to say, we  didn’t have that much time to prepare our work because we thought we would be doing our presentation on Thursday, but we had to do it during are Monday lab so we didn’t get much time to practice and rehearse what to say. But, like before, I hope we will learn from the mistakes we made in this project and the freed back we were given will be invaluable for any future projects. But all in all, this was an interesting project and I learnt a lot about memes and their complex past and history apparently, they have been around since 79 AD during the time of the ancient Roman empire. 

Brief on meme

While I was researching the history of memes and their impact on the internet and on society, I have learned many new and interesting things about memes that I did not know before starting. An example being the fact that the word meme was not used until the 1970s by a man by the name of Richard Dawkins in his book "The Selfish Gene" he said that a meme was an element of a culture or system of behavior passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means. I also learned that they are far older than what I had originally thought, possibly even going as far back as 79 AD during the time of the Roman empire, as what could be described as ancient memes, were found in the ruins of the city of Pompeii. When I first started my research, I thought memes were just a humorous image that was copied and spread rapidly through the use of the internet, but it turns out they have a much deeper meaning contained within them, they can even be used as a type of propaganda if they are used in the correct, or incorrect, manner depending on your point of view.

An example being the memes on modern society and the stereotypes in it. If you take a closer look at them, they can have a much deeper meaning than what is just observed on the surface, they can give a platform to so called social outsiders and their struggle in society. A prime example are the many Joker memes mostly using images from the Batman films and the new Joker movie, according to my research he is meant to represent the outsider, the underestimated and the nobody especially the new Joker.

I also never realized just how much influence memes can have on people and their actions, a perfect example being the storming of Area 51 meme. What started as a joke became an actual event with 150 trying to get into the military base and 1500 attending the related festivals. It makes me think that if people would do something like this because of a joke I can only imagine what would happen if it was used as propaganda. Which is exactly happened during the Yugoslavian war also called the Balkan Civil War. All the participants of the conflict created songs for a genre called turbo-folk, one of the most well know was “Remove Kebab” which was so popular that it became a  became a joke and meme with people all over the internet creating parody's designed make fun of it. 

I feel my group did very well working on this together and have all learned many interesting things while researching for this project, however I am sure there are thing that we can improve on. That we will hopefully be covered in future lectures. 

memes

It was difficult for me at first, finding a group to do the culture assignment with as a large majority of people in my class had already chosen a different type of project or were already in groups of three, which was the most a group could have for an assignment. Eventually I was able to join a group made up of myself Bernard MacDonagh, Aleks Smyczynski and Godwill Ndifor. However I had to ask my lecturer Shawn if it was okay with him because Aleks was in my first group during the creativity assignment and he said at the beginning of the year that we could not work with the same group we were a part of for the last assignment, however he said that it was okay as long I really wasn't able to find a different team to do the assessment with. Once that issue was resolved we all decided to do a project on memes and their history for our culture assignment. More specifically, we decided to work on the underrated memes, the ones that have been forgotten and do not get a lot of attention anymore today and to talk about their effect on social media, society and what kind of effect memes have on the general public.

It was decided that we would work on Yugoslavian war memes, slice of life memes and African memes as well as the history of memes. We would then come together with all the research we had on all four aspects and then integrate our finding into the project. We would then simplify it all into power points to make it easier to present when we had to present it to people in class. However, we were all having a hard time finding any information on memes about Africa so after a while we decided to replace the African meme idea with memes about Area 51. This was much easier as it was a bit more recent, most of them were about the “Storming Area 51” event and how it was going to fail. I was surprised by just how many people actually went to Area 51. Personally, I think most of them just went for the festivals than to actually storm Area 51 itself. Regarding memes about the Yugoslavian war, I was having a difficult time finding memes on the subject what I was able to find was a song and a slice of life meme which eventually became a society meme. 

Brief for GIFs

                                                         BRIEF FOR GIF'S

While I was doing research for the project, I found out a lot about GIFs. A GIF is a lossless format for image files that supports both animated and static images that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite. GIFs are a lot older than I had originally thought being created in the 1980s. I had no idea that it wasn't till 2009 that they became popular. Before this I always thought GIFs where made for memes however there is much more to it than that. When you use the tools correctly you can create some amazing pieces of art out of GIFs, like Lilly Padula, and tools to improve it like Kevin Burg. It wasn’t until the 1990s that it was actually considered a type of art style when MTAA, a two-person artist collective, designed a GIF called “Simple Net Art Diagram” in 1997, which led to a chain reaction with many people making GIFs just like it each with their own unique spin on them. A perfect example being “Art Happens Here” a GIF designed in 2008 which states that art is found in the body and heart.  More importantly, I did not realize just how much work it takes to design a GIF until I had to research how to make one myself.    

I also never knew that it only gained its popularity in 2009 through the use of social media sites such as Tumbler, Reddit and Facebook. Another thing that I discovered was just how many different tools and file formats that were designed to make or help create GIFs like Cinemagraph created by Kevin Burg which are still photographs in which a minor and repeated movement occurs, forming a video clip and are published as an animated GIF giving the illusion that the viewer is watching an animation, and the files like PMG and MNG along with how the LZW compression algorithm, which compresses the file into a smaller file, was with its 2 to 256 colours and the RGB values it uses where red, green, and blue lights are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. GIFs also became popular because of how easy they were for regular people with no previous experience to make them for themselves.  

This will be myself and my groups very first presentation and I am aware that we may make many mistakes, but I hope that myself, Aleks and Jack, can learn from these mistakes and improve so that we do not make the same mistakes again in our future presentations. This presentation has also taught us how to better work as a group, with other people rather than just working by ourselves and how to communicate and interact with our fellow classmates.