Category: Creative Critical Reflection 1

This task allowed me to much better visualize and understand the diversity and breadth of not only my own but most people’s media intake, as both consumers and producers.
It is evidenced in my collage that, following the theory by Blumler and Katz, the media in our lives spans over four primary areas of concentration, referred to as uses and gratifications, these being;

• Entertainment/Diversion– Media designed to distract from everyday life and offer an escape from mediocrity
  
• Social Interaction– Media which allows a connection and interaction between users
• Personal Identity– Media which can be used to define a person through their own individual interests, hobbies and opinions
• Information/Surveillance– Media made to inform, educate and communicate data to an audience

By completing this task I am now able to better categorize, identify and understand different areas of media and apply these categories of uses and gratification to my own creations. This can then be applied when creating my own magazine, ensuring it covers multiple uses and gratifications, so is both informative and entertaining to the consumer.

For this activity we were put into pairs and tasked to create an exemplary, interdependent system out of LEGO. In this example Alex Radford and I worked together to create a hospital scenario, which works in a cycle as follows;

• A patient is ill and requires surgery
• A doctor provides surgery and the clinic is paid
• The money from the clinic’s payment is used to hire an engineer
• The engineer is able to create new technology of a higher standard for the clinic’s use
• The clinic is now able to perform surgery more safely and efficiently in the future

This example shows how each element is interdependent, and the cycle will continue seemingly limitlessly as further advancements are made.

By exploring this prospect I am now able to better comprehend how this idea can be translated to the context of media, with different elements of production and consumption, relying on each other to continue to function as they do at the moment. This can be demonstrated in the mind map below that I created, demonstrating the role of technology in media distribution.

This activity has given me the knowledge to apply this information when creating my own magazine, considering how each element would be involved with its production and distribution, to create an all around more realistic and commercial magazine.

Without the opportunity to take a media-based course for GCSE I was eager to join this course and experience the subject. I really look forward to studying Media for the next two years, as I have always been interested in more creative subjects, and am comfortable (and enjoy) working in a digital medium, as well as looking further into how what is created can have greater impacts on audiences and consumers.

As mentioned before, I am comfortable with using digital mediums, this is because I have had access to the Adobe Creative Cloud at home for some time and consequently have spent a lot of time trying out and playing with the different tools and features in both Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro. This creative freedom and satisfaction in seeing the final product of my creations was also a likely contributor to my choosing to take this subject for A-level.

Hopefully by taking this subject I will leave in year 13 with a larger breadth of knowledge on the impacts of media, as well as a wider collection of transferable skills, such as working with a group, using an online blog/portfolio and communication, when it comes to using digital and creative technologies, assisting me in my ambitions to enter into a creative, art based career.