iPhone 5 "promo" video

Here's a hilarious parody video about the soon-to-be-released iPhone 5. Definitely supports the idea that people use image sharing to construct a version of themselves that could be very different from reality.

Meme wha-?

MEMES. 
What's the deal with memes??

So in case you are still not familiar with the concept of a "meme", it's pretty much a picture with a witty caption used to construct or add to a cultural paradigm. In this case, it's Big Brother. Ever since the meme generation burst through our social-media doors, even television reality shows like BB have their own Facebook pages, Instagram sites, just posting memes. In short, memes are a new adaptation in visual media.

Now I chose the above example, because I think it perfectly exemplifies the purpose of a meme. Obviously the picture is poking fun at a Big Brother contestant, saying she looks like a hooker. As I explained in my last post, much of the power of a photo comes from its polysemic nature. It can be interpreted in a million and one ways... And our generation is very clever. Using digital technology and social networking distribution, we have capitalised on this interpretive nature of photos, and have used words to give them meaning. And to sway the opinions of our audience. So rather than letting a picture speak for itself, the power is now in captions.

That in mind, I wonder: Is the visual web as powerful as we think it to be? What is a photo without words? What are words without a photo? Which has greater weight?

xx Nicola

Instagramation Part 3

Whatsup Bloggers?

So I had an epiphany. An Instagram epiphany. An Instiphany, if you will.

YES we use visual media as a way of constructing ourselves, as a way of constructing a representation of ourselves, in the minds of our "perceivers". But what if our photos are saying something we don't want them to say?

Today, I was looking through my sister's Instagram, and through my best friend's Instagram, two people that I have known pretty much my whole life. And I realised that this is something which we haven't really touched on in group research. I realised this limitation.

 My best friend was posting pictures of her trip to Hawaii earlier this year, and a lot of the photos were the very abstract-deep-and-meaningful-picture-of-a-cocktail-by-the-Waikiki-surf kind of thing. I know why she was posting those photos, because they were a representation of her deepest passion: to travel. Preferably to places that have a little ocean :P. But the comments that followed didn't mimick her intentions... in particular, a photo of her in a glamorous rooftop hotel pool had people tagging her as "rich rich b*tch" and "If only my dad could afford to send me to those places".... All meant as jokes, of course, but not the image she wanted to portray.

It's all well and good to want to communicate your own, constructed self-identity over the web. But the limitation of visual media is a lack of words. A lack of explanation. Isn't that crucial to constructing an image?

What if we're all just getting the wrong idea?

xx Nicola

Birth to 10. A photo a day.

This is a video of parents who took regular photos of their daughter growing up from birth to 10.
I wonder what the original goal was in taking a photo each day, and then the decision to post in a video. Now that it's on YouTube and on the internet, what impact does it have on the girl featured? Is it something we should be concerned with?

How iPhoto works and has become more accessible

Hey guys, 

This is my final post for now. Just a couple of cool articles that give some great insight into why iPhoto is so accessible and how it is really not difficult to use at all. 

Anyone can present their personal memories in their own way if they want to. 

New York Times on "ambitious photo tools".

iPhoto is also accessible for people that only own iPad and not a MacBook product, and this form of iPhoto may be even easier to use and shape a different perception of memories and culture with than ever before...

Check out a review of how it works here. 

Paul x

Project Management Pitch and Reflection

Hey everyone, 

Just thought I would share with you the section of the pitch that I primarily worked on and reflect on it a little.

Our way of seeing project management: 

As we are all co-existing as a team, we have decided that everyone should and must help each other with their specific roles, and obviously the roles will overlap, but we have assigned a “main” role for all group members based on their individual interests and strengths. So:

-      Mel’s main focus will be the video content. We plan to film several of our interviews, so Mel will be in charge of this and will oversee the creation of other videos, such as an introductory video to the topic, which we plan to use on our feature.

-      Although everyone will be writing, Paul will be the writing editor who will ensure that all our content fits together well, stays focused on our angle, and makes sense.

-      Ash will focus on photography and graphics, a significant part of our feature.

-      We’ll all be uploading our content on Word Press, but Nicola will be our head “tech girl”

-      And I’m the project manager, basically controlling everything…haha jokes, but I’ll make sure we’re all on target with our tasks, and be mainly responsible for things like setting up interviews.

As well as this, we’ll all be individually working on our own “journeys”, and we’ll divide up the more investigative articles between us so everyone has one article as their main focus, although we’ll aim to have at least two or three of us present at each interview.

From here, next week we will continue researching and finalising ideas for specific parts of the feature, as well as forming a list of people to approach for interviews. 

We’ll then approach them and try to set up interviews over the next few weeks. 

We’re going to focus mainly on information gathering and writing for the next three weeks, and the three weeks after that will focus on web design, upload and editing. 

Reflection:

In retrospect our plan is not as "broken down" as some other group's plans were for the pitch, but that is primarily because we didn't want to confuse everyone. We are definitely on target to complete our goals on time, and have since come up with a more detailed project management scheme that is probably a little too long-winded for posting here. :) 

Paul

iPhotoing Part 3: Seasons and Time

Hey again everyone!

So I just wanted to share some more edits that are a little more extreme!

To show how you can completely change the season and time period that you are representing through your edited iPhoto photo, through dramatic shifts in the "Adjust" functions and "Effects".

Here I've dramatically adjusted the exposure, contrast, saturation, highlights, shadows, temperature etc of the image to make the colours extremely vibrant. 

Now it looks like it's a hot summer's day, because to be honest it was so cold, I think I would have preferred to go in summer...Now it looks like I am rather silly wearing all those layers, doesn't it look like it's at least 30c? 

So the way this image was edited is a reflection of my direct memories of my freezing (but amazing) holiday and how the seasons have shaped the way I represented it. 

Here I was thinking about New York at the turn of the 20th century...

So I toned down the colour and vibrancy of the image with a series of functions again, and gave the impression of an old camera having taken the photo through the "Vignette" function. 

So what I have tried to show you all through this journey, is that editing isn't just for the sake of pretending to be more aesthetically polished.

iPhoto can truly give strong insights into your personal interests and how you can convey them pictorially. 

Paul 

Content Development

Hey bloggers <3

Thought I would quickly upload the content development side of our feature, which we covered in our pitch.

Our feature will focus on both the internal sense of self, and the external way we are perceived by others. To address the internal process of self-construction we will interview academics in the sociology and cultural studies departments. We will also explore this issue through personal reflection, where each of us will embark on a “visual media journey” and investigate how the practice of image sharing relates to self identity. We will each journey into a particular visual platform – Nicola will be looking at Instagram, Mel will be looking at Facebook (focusing on the profile and cover pictures, as well as controlling photo tagging), Anna will be looking at Tumblr, Paul will be looking at photo editing in iPhoto before posting online, and I’ll be looking at Pinterest.

To address the way image sharing shapes the way we are perceived by others, we will focus on various implications of image sharing. We haven’t fully decided on everything we’ll focus on in this section yet, but our main ideas at the moment are:

• Firstly, how many kids who grow up today will have their whole lives online, and some with be very widely known courtesy of popular mummy bloggers. How will this affect the way they are perceived by others as they grow up? For this, we’ll try to interview some mummy bloggers and maybe a child psychologist
• And secondly, how photos you put up on facebook can have a negative impact if seen by the wrong person e.g. your boss, or if you are a high profile person, for example, the fallout from the “gun photo” of Australian Olympic swimmers Nick D’Arcy and Kenrick Monk. For this, we aim to interview some careers advisors and people who have been negatively impacted by photos they’ve posted online.
• Thirdly, we’d like to look at how images that go viral impact the people in them, such as people commonly featured in internet memes.

For this feature, we aim to use the online medium in innovative ways by playing with the internal self versus external self juxtaposition. We were thinking of having an opening page with doors or windows, one looking inside and another looking outside. When users click on the inside facing one, they would be led to our personal journeys and stories about self-construction, and when they click on the outside facing one, they will be led to the articles about how image sharing impacts the way others see us.

We want to use as much visual content as possible, seeing as our feature is about the visual web. We’re also looking at making the site interactive, through enabling comments and allowing users to submit photos, maybe in gallery series such as ‘Edited or Not?’, where people have to guess whether the photo is edited, or ‘Before and after’, where people post photos before and after editing or filtering, or where people get to post captions for photos. The feature will also have a page on Facebook that we’ll regularly update, providing another chance for users to interact with our site.

xx Nicola

Handout from the pitch