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