Week 6: Project 2 Proposal

1. Concept
Our area of investigation is going to be identity, and how technology has affected it negatively. Our video will include statistics, reviews, and interviews on this topic.

2. Working Hypothesis
The inevitable development of the network society, has demanded in its core, constant innovation and development of communicative methods. Communication had a different meaning before globalization. Communication meant a phone call from a home line or a letter which reached a person 4-8 weeks depending on their location. Since communicative methods were different, it is safe to assume that relationships carried with them a different meaning as well. This has caused isolation of personal identities. Communication has changed individuality. The way we see and represent ourselves has changed vastly. Since there are more methods of expressing yourself, making friends and networks, learning, and engaging in activities with strangers; there is a misconception that communication has reached its peak. Yes communication has reached its peak, but with the loss of personal identity. According to Freud, we all have many different “persona(s)” hidden within us which only come out when a situation requires it. Persona, according to Wikipedia means “A persona, in the word's everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor”. The World Wide Web has given people more opportunities to communicate, but in return develop more personas within themselves. Hence, the network society has brought a loss of identity and isolation of individuals. This global culture is anonymous to personal feelings and the true identities of individuals. In our podcast we would like to target those people who feel that the wireless borders of the internet have caused them to lose the true essence of face to face, emotional, empathetic, emoticon-less communication, which are requirements of human nature and comfort. The computer has removed the true ways of communication, which have taken place for centuries. We would like to say in this podcast, through various points of views of people who have truly lost/hidden their true identity due to the developments of communicative technologies. We would like to ask people of different ages on how they feel the internet has brought about a loss of personal identity and true human communication.

3. Research Approach
We will be conducting field research as well as scholarly journals and articles which include recent statistics. We will be referring to journal articles, and citing them. Using statistics and research done previously by scholars and psychologists/sociologists we can back up our claim: loss of identity is perpendicular to enhancement of communication.

4. Treatment
For our video we plan to use a lot of real life, unscripted footage like interviews with people from different walks of life. The interviews will be broken down into segments that overlap each other and will be an informal questioning about how people act on the web and how they portray themselves on the internet. The concentration will be on how they willingly change themselves when they go on the internet. And if we find willing participants we might even get people to show us their personal pages and their online ‘personas’ on social networking sites like Facebook. In order to add some diversity to our video we plan to have a few animated sequences or at least a few original cartoon images like thought clouds or speech bubbles at certain points. For instance a possible opening sequence that we’ve thought about includes having a picture of a person divided with one side remaining ‘real’ while the other side is made into a cartoon with different speech and thought bubbles, that show the various identities the person has on the internet and in their daily lives. As for the sound, since our video is going to be interview based, any background music we add will be kept to a minimum so that the voices can be heard clearly. And to make sure that people understand the words spoken we even plan to add sub-titles for better accessibility. If we do have animated sequences, we will definitely add the required sound effects but we don’t intend to use much in that category as we don’t want to pull away from the interviews.

Week 5: My Team

Team Name: Unidentified


Team Members and their roles:
Annabel Yoon: Research
Bo-Mee Song: Research and interviewer
Maria Rizvi: Writing and editing
Pearl Desa: Research, writing and editing
Therese D'Souza: Filming and final editing



Initial Concept:
The loss of identity and the development of multiple persona's in the essence of individuality. The global culture has brought about many different sides of a person, but has hidden what truly lies within them. We would like to research the way in which people have been able to manipulate their true identity into multiple clashing personalities that lay within the cover of one person. The internet has become a playing field of identities through various communication networks and platforms.

Week 4: What makes a good video podcast? A Review of My Fav.

Geek Woo Podcast 001 - Chocolate Dipped Strawberries
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FrqpDR__3k

This video podcast was about the process of making the chocolate dipped strawberries. At the first part, it showed the title of the podcast, and explained what they are going to tell us about. This podcast was different than other cooking podcast. Before they show us about the title, I could hear them talking each other in blank background without showing anything. It also attracted me and I got more interested about this podcast. I could see the words that describe about time, cost, and what we will need to make chocolate dipped strawberries, which helped me to understand quickly, and I thought it was simple way to explain it. While they were showing the words, I could also hear the sound of them having a joke each other. I found out several things that make good video podcast while I was watching “Chocolate Dipped Strawberries”.
In this case, the lighting and silent background sounds were great, and especially music was fitted well. Although it was not professionally well explained, the story was interested to me, because I was curious about how to make chocolate dipped strawberries from the first, and the reason I picked this podcast is I wanted to try it later. It had appropriate time, which was not too long or not too short, and they spoke clearly, so I understood everything what they talked about. However I though there were some problems in this podcast, because first of all it did not have professional quality, and also ability to filming skill was not that great. There was one part that was totally out of topic, because while they were waiting for chocolate to freeze, it showed one of them playing game. I think it was just for fun, but it might be confusing to other people who watch podcast.
In conclusion, some important points that make a good podcast are interesting topic and make people to be interest. A good podcast need to have creative style, focus on one topic, lighting and no sound clutter, good filming skill, professional quality, and speaking clearly.