Group 2C
Carley Bartlett, Ryan Powell, Antoniya Petkova, Jordan Muckley, Bashir Yusuf, Katherine Tysoe
and Sarah Myers.
To start with, we had a group discussion which involved talking about various problems that we were having with our blogs. One problem that was raised was the fact that uploading photo’s of our Cabinet Of Curiosities took up a lot of storage space. Spencer recommended uploading photo’s onto another photo sharing website, such as photobucket, and then posting the link on our own blog.
The first group to discuss the task brought up celebrity culture, bad blockbuster movies, Big Brother and these were all aspects of the media that they disliked and these features were common throughout their Cabinet of Curiosities. Areas of the media they did like were the film Shaun of the Dead and adverts with a purpose, such as Oxfam, raising smoking awareness, etc. One member of the group claimed to dislike TV due to it being ‘too mainstream’. A group discussion followed this that debated what we consider mainstream TV.
This discussion then lead to us talking about how the media encourages us to be ‘individual’. Everyone wants to feel in control and have freedom to express themselves. After this, we then went on to discuss how being individual also leads to us being stereotyped. For example, one of the members of the group said that their mum shopped at Marks and Spencer’s and the member said their mum does this to make them seem like middle class. However, these stereotypes were flawed when another member of the group stated that they listen to classical music which could be classed as ‘upper-class’, yet their family grew up on a council estate, therefore testing the categories created from stereotypes.
The next group then bought up the topic of social networking sites, with pros and cons for both. A good thing about social networking sites was that you could be nosey and see what other people are getting up to, but on the downside you also have no privacy due to social networking sites being so easily accessible. The TV feature ‘TV On Demand’ was then bought up, and we evaluated whether this feature was a good thing or a bad. The majority of the group saw TV On Demand as a good thing, yet a small minority of the group felt that TV On Demand gives you access to programmes that really shouldn’t be broadcast on television. This bought up that pretty much any TV programme that’s broadcast anywhere around the world can be accessed via the internet, which then posed the question is freedom within the media really a good thing.
Spencer bought up the Laswell’s Model which are a series of five questions; who? says what? to whom? in what channel? with what effect? Spencer said that this would be a good way to structure the final essay that we have to write for this module.
One of the final points bought up within the discussion was a point on communication as a whole. Some issues raised were how to overcome barriers that block communication, such as being on the phone and not being able to speak to each other face to face; body language; cultural differences; gender; social etiquette. These are also factors we have to consider in the future when communication as a whole, via any medium.Labels: tasks |
