Susan Mwai
JOUR 3751 - Digital Media and Culture
Multimedia Project: Reflective Essay
6th May 2019
Multimedia Project: Reflective Essay
For the multimedia project I wanted to research the topic of digital activism, the ways in which social media plays a role in political campaigns and activist movements, and whether it does more harm than good. In light of recent years I felt that this topic was relevant as we have seen people in society take to platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to get the word out about movements such as the #BlackLivesMatter and the #MeToo movements, which were the two movements I focused on in my final project. I felt it was important to look into how such activism taking place mostly online is affecting groups of people locally and also worldwide.
For my project I decided to make a podcast to present my topic of digital activism. To begin, I used the university’s library database to find scholarly articles and was pleasantly surprised with the results I obtained. Turns out there have been numerous research studies that have been conducted in regard to this topic. I picked the ones that I felt I could (a) pull out the most information from, and (b) I would be able to create an interesting podcast that would deliver my intended message. After going through the resources I had found, the next step was to figure out how to record a podcast and discern which equipment I would need. Luckily, since podcasting has become very popular within the last five years, there were plenty of tutorials I was able to follow and downloaded the necessary software. Next, I rented microphones from Latis to record and make sure I had quality sound in my final product.
Next was the writing of the script and this is where I struggled the most. Having never made a podcast before, I wasn’t sure how my writing ‘voice’ would translate into an audio format. Additionally, I needed to make sure that what I included would not only meet the project’s time requirement, but also that the information I included was presented in a way that was concise and would leave listeners feeling as if they learned something. I listened to multiple podcasts such as If I Were You, Schnitt Talk, Reply All, and This American Life for inspiration on how to format my project. I would like to add that I intentionally left out speaking about the This Is America music video by Childish Gambino. I realised that although the video and song sparked major conversation about police brutality, there wasn’t a call to action that can be seen in more organised activist groups. After multiple rewrites, recordings, and edits I am very happy with the final project. I got to use software and technology I would never have used on my own and created a form of media that was completely to for me.
This topic directly relates to our class lectures on Virality + Spreadability and Digital Activism. As we discussed, spreadable media is media “which travels across media platforms at least in p...
