Question 1: How does your product use or challenge conventions and how does it represent social groups or issues?
Question 3: How did your production skills develop throughout this project?
Below is a voice recording of me reading through my letter in order to spell check and make changes where needed.
Media Ecology
Neil Postman defines Media Ecology as ‘the study of media as environments’. An ecosystem has connotations of interconnectivity and bringing in multiple different elements in order to reach a common goal – comparable to the relationship of a cleaner bird and a crocodile. The cleaner bird cleans all the food stuck in a crocodile’s mouth that could cause infection and then it uses it as a food sources. This makes them interdependant meaning without each other they couldn’t survive.
Me and a partner created a mind map including the following categories:
- Technology
- Audience
- Money
- Social Media
- Creators
- Distribution
- Government
- Institutions
The purpose of this task was to reflect on how every element in the previously mentioned list interlink in order to make a complete, functioning media ecosystem and I’ve now realised the importance of all elements coming together and if they don’t it is near impossible to create successful media.
I related this theory back to me and put myself in the shoes of a creator trying to create and distribute a music magazine, which is what I will be doing shortly and I will now apply my new knowledge of media ecology for my magazine.
My Media Diet
My reflection:
Spending time analysing and categorising the types of media I take in has opened my eyes to realising that not only am I consumer of media, I am also a producer of media, without even realising it, therefore making me a Prosumer. I have learnt that every comment, post or engagement on social media counts towards creating media.
I collated a variety of images of types of media that I ingest and categorised them into the following categories;
- Education and Information
- Entertainment
- Personal Identity
- Social Interaction
This helped me become more aware of what I actually get out of the media I consume, enabling me to be more selective in the media I take in.
This task has allowed me to take forward information I was never aware of before. Now being confident in categorising media into the four previously stated categories, I will try to make sure that all media texts I produce going forward, are hitting all the categories of the Uses and Gratification theory, which will allow me to create the best possible media texts in future and maximise the potential audience for future projects, like the music magazine. I will now aim to make my magazine informative, entertaining, provoke a feeling of personal identity and create social interaction to fit in with the Blumler & Katz theory of Uses and Gratification.