‘Without convergence the internet would be obsolete’. How far do you agree or disagree with this statement in terms of audiences and institutions.

What this question is really asking is that have the devices that allow multiple uses made the internet more useful.

What convergence has done, is made the internet more user friendly for audiences and allowed institutions to maximise their profits by producing convergent devices. Eg as a case study look at apple, the iphone, or ipad 2, now have cameras on, so audiences can film or photograph and upload their creations to say flickr or youtube or facebook.

If audiences didn’t have mobile phones with cameras on would audicnes  still bother to upload their pictures in a more conventional way, the answer is, yes, but not as much.

Generation Web'  - the generation who have grown up knowing only a wired world - will enter adulthood having spent 10,000 hours online. These digital natives thinknothing of uploading their lives and really exploiting the convergent possibilities of devices, X box live, PSP etc, in terms of the phone, many older people complain that they want a mobile phone that simply telephones and that the other apps are irrelevant and a nuisance.

You could expand these examples to the film, music& news industries but in essence , the answer is that convergence has maximised the usefulness of the internet, it would never be obsolete (useless) now, but convergent devices have enabled its massive expansion and the pay off is

Every day Google gathers millions of search terms that help them refine their search system and give them a direct marketing bonanza that they keep for months.

Every week Facebook receives millions of highly personal status updates that are kept forever and are forming the basis of direct advertising revenue.

Every month free newspapers plant and track a cookie tracking device on your computer that tells them what your range of interests are and allows them to shape their adverts and in the future, even content around you.

So you're not just being watched, you're being traded. The currency has changed

Online Media Guidance from chief examiner

“The impact of the internet on the media is revolutionary”. Discuss.
“For media audiences, the internet has changed everything.” Discuss
“The impact of the internet on the media is exaggerated”. Discuss.
Discuss the extent to which the distribution and consumption of media have been transformed by the internet
Explain the extent to which online media exist alongside older methods of distribution in 2010.
Evaluate the opportunities and the threats offered to media producers by the internet.

Questions tend to focus on what difference the internet has made ('revolutionary', 'changed everything', 'exaggerated', 'transformed''opportunities and threats') but also looking at audiences and producers. So long as you read the question carefully to see which angle it is looking for, you shouldn't have a problem. However, this focus on 'difference' does mean you have to be thinking about what the media was like pre-internet.

If we look at the bullet points in the Specification, which defines what should be studied, we should be able to see what kinds of question can come up:

• How have online media developed? (change from the past)
• What has been the impact of the internet on media production? (does it allow more people to produce their own media? what effect has it had on mainstream media?)
• How is consumer behaviour and audience response transformed by online media, in relation to the past? (audiences and the difference the internet has made)
• To what extent has convergence transformed the media? (technology's impact- mobile devices, tv online, etc)

the kinds of thing you could talk about would include:
music downloading and distribution, 
the film industry and the internet, 
online television, 
online gaming and virtual worlds, 
online news provision, 
various forms of online media production by the public or a range of other online / social media forms. 



It is pretty open in terms of what you might have studied, so I would expect answers to draw upon very different case study material.

This part of the exam asks you to do three more specific things, whatever topic you answer on:

1. You MUST refer to at least TWO different media
2. You MUST refer to past, present and future (with the emphasis on the present- contemporary examples from the past five years)
3. refer to critical/theoretical positions

So for 1. Different types of media online count, so the fact that you are talking about say, music downloading and people making youtube videos would tick the boxes for two media, even though they are both online.

For 2. the main thing is to ensure you have a majority of material from the past five years. I'd urge you to make it even more recent than that- say the time you have been doing the course, as the web changes so fast. Talking about the future for this topic is easy- you can speculate about how your chosen examples might develop in the future- what next after facebook? what can you see happening with mobile media? how will traditional media cope with further spread of fast wireless connections? Some good speculation on this you could use is here

For 3. you need some critics/writers who have developed ideas about online media. I'll be recommending some below.

Over the past two years, I've blogged a lot about media in the online age, with a huge range of examples on which you could draw.

Alan Partridge's web series is a good case study of how TV might adapt for the web and it would make a good comparison with Dub Plate drama, designed specifically with the web in mind, with its alternative endings which could be voted for via TV or MySpace. there is a further blog on microseries here. If you used these in an answer, you'd need a second case study which linked with a different medium, perhaps something like Twitter.A second piece on Twitter ishere.

For theorists, I blogged last year to introduce some useful writers, Find themhere. A useful revision activity would be to watch the BBC Virtual revolutions series, which I blogged about here. I've also posted stuff about changing technology here and on how audiences are collaborating to make videos onlinehere and on Michael Wesch's analysis of online production and internet memes.

So there is plenty of material! The main thing is to narrow down what you intend to use and to have some arguments to make around it. Look at the previous questions and decide which of the examples you want to draw upon would work with them and what kind of argument you would want to make.

Oh and here is the story behind a great bit of up to date online age stuff!

Lady gaga

Good article about claims that the internet is like the Wild west

Wednesday Question 1b

Here are  all the  questions which have been set in previous sessions:

Analyse media representation in one of your coursework productions.
Analyse one of your coursework productions in relation to genre
Apply theories of narrative to one of your coursework productions.
You will notice that each of these questions is quite short and fits a common formula. You can be assured that the same thing will apply this summer. You will be asked to apply ONE concept to one of your productions. This is a quite different task from question 1a, where you write about all of your work and your skills, as this one involves some reference to theory and only the one piece of work, as well as asking you to step back from it and think about it almost as if someone else had made it- what is known as ‘critical distance’.

There are five possible concepts which can come up

Representation
Genre
Narrative
Audience
Media Language

If you look through those questions above, you will see that the first three have all already come up, but don’t be fooled into thinking that means that it must be one of the other two this time- exams don’t always work that predictably! It would be far too risky just to bank on that happening and not prepare for the others! In any case, preparing for them all will help you understand things better and there are areas of overlap which you can use across the concepts.

So, how do you get started preparing and revising this stuff? First of all, you need to decide which project you would be most confident analysing in the exam. I believe that any of the five can be applied to moving image work, so if you did a film opening at AS, a music video, short film or trailer at A2, that would be the safest choice. Print work is more tricky to write about in relation to narrative, but the other four areas would all work well for it, so it is up to you, but to be honest, I’d prepare in advance of the exam as you don’t want to be deciding what to use during your precious half hour! What you certainly need is a copy of the project itself to look at as part of your revision, to remind yourself in detail of how it works.

Representation

If you take a video you have made for your coursework, you will almost certainly have people in it. If the topic is representation, then your task is to look at how those representations work in your video. You could apply some of the ideas used in the AS TV Drama exam here- how does your video construct a representation of gender, ethnicity or age for example? You need also to refer to some critics who have written about representation or theories of media representation and attempt to apply those (or argue with them). So who could you use? Interesting writers on representation and identity include Richard Dyer, Angela McRobbie and David Gauntlett. See what they say...

Genre

If you’ve made a music magazine at AS level, an analysis of the magazine would need to set it in relation to the forms and conventions shown in such magazines, particularly for specific types of music. But it would not simply comprise a list of those conventions. There are a whole host of theories of genre and writers with different approaches. Some of it could be used to inform your writing about your production piece. Some you could try are: Altman, Grant and Neale- all are cited in the wikipedia page here

Narrative

A film opening or trailer will be ideal for this, as they both depend upon ideas about narrative in order to function. An opening must set up some of the issues that the rest of the film’s narrative will deal with, but must not give too much away, since it is only an opening and you would want the audience to carry on watching! Likewise a trailer must draw upon some elements of the film’s imaginary complete narrative in order to entice the viewer to watch it, again without giving too much away. If you made a short film, you will have been capturing a complete narrative, which gives you something complete to analyse. If you did a music video, the chances are that it was more performance based, maybe interspersed with some fragments of narrative. In all these cases, there is enough about narrative in the product to make it worth analysis. The chances are you have been introduced to a number of theories about narrative, but just in case, here’s a link to a PDF by Andrea Joyce, which summarises four of them, including Propp and Todorov. 

Audience

Every media product has to have an audience, otherwise in both a business sense and probably an artistic sense too it would be judged a failure. In your projects, you will undoubtedly have been looking at the idea of a target audience- who you are aiming it at and why; you should also have taken feedback from a real audience in some way at the end of the project for your digital evaluation, which involves finding out how the audience really ‘read’ what you had made. You were also asked at AS to consider how your product addressed your audience- what was it about it that particularly worked to ‘speak’ to them? All this is effectively linked to audience theory which you then need to reference and apply. 

Media Language

A lot of people have assumed this is going to be the most difficult concept to apply, but I don’t think it need be. If you think back to the AS TV Drama exam, when you had to look at the technical codes and how they operate, that was an exercise in applying media language analysis, so for the A2 exam if this one comes up, I’d see it as pretty similar. For moving image, the language of film and television is defined by how camera, editing, sound and mise-en-scene create meaning. Likewise an analysis of print work would involve looking at how fonts, layout, combinations of text and image as well as the actual words chosen creates meaning. Useful theory here might be Roland Barthes on semiotics- denotation and connotation and for moving image work Bordwelland Thompson 

So what do you do in the exam?

You need to state which project you are using and briefly describe it
You then need to analyse it using whichever concept appears in the question, making reference to relevant theory throughout
Keep being specific in your use of examples from the project

Here is a link to a good answer to q1a and 1b from the January session.

Tuesday

here are ALL previous questions for each element, from the exams in Jan and June 2010 and Jan 2011:

1a
Describe how you developed research and planning skills for media production and evaluate how these skills contributed to creative decision making. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how these skills developed over time.

Describe the ways in which your production work was informed by research into real media texts and how your ability to use such research for production developed over time.

Describe how you developed your skills in the use of digital technology for media production and evaluate how these skills contributed to your creative decision making. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how these skills developed over time.

1b

Analyse media representation in one of your coursework productions.

Analyse one of your coursework productions in relation to genre.

Apply theories of narrative to one of your coursework productions.

Section B
Online Media

“The impact of the internet on the media is revolutionary”. Discuss.

“For media audiences, the internet has changed everything.” Discuss

“The impact of the internet on the media is exaggerated”. Discuss.

Discuss the extent to which the distribution and consumption of media have been transformed by the internet.

Explain the extent to which online media exist alongside older methods of distribution in 2010.

Evaluate the opportunities and the threats offered to media producers by the internet.



escribe how you developed research and planning skills for media production and evaluate how these skills contributed to creative decision making. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how these skills developed over time.

Describe the ways in which your production work was informed by research into real media texts and how your ability to use such research for production developed over time.

Describe how you developed your skills in the use of digital technology for media production and evaluate how these skills contributed to your creative decision making. Refer to a range of examples in your answer to show how these skills developed over time.

You will notice that each of these begins by asking you to 'describe' and then goes on to ask you to reflect in some way: "evaluate", "how you used" "how your skills developed". herein lies the key to this part of the exam! You only have half an hour for the question and you really need to make the most of that time by quickly moving from description (so the reader knows what you did) to analysis/evaluation/reflection, so he/she starts to understand what you learnt from it.

there are five possible areas which can come up

Digital technology
Research and Planning
Conventions of Real Media
Post-Production
Creativity.

If you look through those questions above, you will see that they all contain at least two of the five- creativity is mentioned (as 'creative decision making') in two of them alongside the main area (digital technology on one, research and planning skills in the other). In the third of those past questions , research is combined with conventions of real media. So as you can see, the question is likely to mix and match the five, so you HAVE to be able to think on your feet and answer the question that is there.

So, how do you get started preparing and revising this stuff? I would suggest that you begin by setting out, on cards or post-its, a list of answers to these questions:

What production activities have you done?

This should include both the main task and preliminary task from AS and the main and ancillaries at A2 plus any non-assessed activities you have done as practice, and additionally anything you have done outside the course which you might want to refer to, such as films made for other courses or skateboard videos made with your mates if you think you can make them relevant to your answer.

What digital technology have you used?

This should not be too hard- include hardware (cameras, phones for pictures/audio, computers and anything else you used) software (on your computer) and online programs, such as blogger, youtube etc

In what ways can the work you have done be described as creative?

This is a difficult question and one that does not have a correct answer as such, but ought to give you food for thought.

What different forms of research did you do?

Again you will need to include a variety of examples- institutional research (such as on how titles work in film openings), audience research (before you made your products and after you finished for feedback), research into conventions of media texts (layout, fonts, camera shots, soundtracks, everything!) and finally logistical research- recce shots of your locations, research into costume, actors, etc


What conventions of real media did you need to know about?

For this, it is worth making a list for each project you have worked on and categorising them by medium so that you don’t repeat yourself

What do you understand by ‘post-production’ in your work?

This one, I’ll answer for you- for the purpose of this exam, it is defined as everything after planning and shooting or live recording. In other words, the stage of your work where you manipulated your raw material on the computer, maybe using photoshop, a video editing program or desktop publishing.


For each of these lists, your next stage is to produce a set of examples- so that when you make the point in the exam, you can then back it up with a concrete example. You need to be able to talk about specific things you did in post-production and why they were significant, just as you need to do more than just say ‘I looked on youtube’ for conventions of real media, but actually name specific videos you looked at, what you gained from them and how they influenced your work.

This question will be very much about looking at your skills development over time, the process which brought about this progress, most if not all the projects you worked on from that list above, and about reflection on how how you as a media student have developed. Unusually, this is an exam which rewards you for talking about yourself and the work you have done!

Final tips: you need some practice- this is very hard to do without it! I’d have a crack at trying to write an essay on each of the areas, or at the very least doing a detailed plan with lots of examples. The fact that it is a 30 minute essay makes it very unusual, so you need to be able to tailor your writing to that length- a tough task!

Monday

I came in today but wasn't well enough to stay I'm afraid.

I will try my best to come in tomorrow morning for you. I understand some of you are getting a bit anxious. Please try not to. Everything I have put on the blog is exactly what I would have done with you. We have covered everything on the syllabus and all we are doing now is revision. Fingers crossed I should be fully recovered after half term so I will do some extra revision lessons  for you while you are on study leave. They can be for a whole morning or afternoon as I won't have Year 12 or 11 lessons timetabled.
Keep doing the timed essays, I am marking them as much as I can. The ones I have had from you have been excellent. You are very well prepared and all you need now is to practice writing at speed, including up to date examples and reference to theorists. We have covered enough theorists to support you in your essays.

The big issue that I would have discussed with you today is this one How parliamentary law needs to catch up with online media developments ie the Twitter V super injunctions row.

You should research this issue further and answer the question

'How have online media affected society and the institutions of news provision, music and film'.

Once again, don't panic!! All being well I will see you tomorrow.

Work for Friday and the weekend

Remember you should be following the revision timetable I gave you, so by now, you should have gone  through all of your notes and summarisied them.
For Online media you should have them in topic form and you should have up to date examplles and quotes from theorists for each one.
For Critical perspectives you should have filled out those A3 sheets you got months ago (there are copies on the blog if you have mislaid them) and you should have notes, examples and theory about each of your productions in terms of:
genre
audience
language
representation
and narrative

you should also have notes on production practices from this list:
digital technology
creativity
research & plannin
post-production and using conventions of real media products




Another up to date theorist is Aleks Krotoski.
She has written some excellent article in the Guardian recently. Click here
In todays lesson I would like you to read these and take down some quotes that you could use to support your points in your essays.
All being well I should be back in school on Monday and will be very interested to see what you have been doing. 
Essay of the week comes from Holly. A really good example of theory and up to date examples.


Holly

Work for this week

Hello, so sorry not to be with you last week. I had an accident last weekend and sustained concussion which has made me feel really ill. I hope to be back in school on Friday. So in the meantime you need to keep an eye on the blogs and get on with preparing timed essays. You can email them to me and I will try and return them as soon as is possible. Still have had no responses from some of you. Use the revision plan pamphlet that I gave to you some weeks ago to ensure you are on task.

A couple of points, Lily, Melania and Brooke, you all need to put your candidate number in the title of your blog. Lily, you need to upload a larger version of your video to you tube as the font on the version you have is all fuzzy.

Everyone else, please check this link to ensure that your blog is the correct version as this is the hub that is being sent to the examiner.

Now that everyones advanced portfolios are completed, well done.
This would be a good time to start preparing for the Critical Perspectives exam.

Read this article from Long road.
Make notes on it and incorporate your own knowledge of audience, using Gauntlett, Jenkins and Hall to answer the following question.

'What impact did your understanding of the theory of audience have on one of your productions?'

Tomorrow you should focus on Narrative and use this document to provide the theory back up.

Answer this question

'How important is narrative in creating a media product? Answer with close reference to one or more of your productions'.

Work for Wednesday's lesson, make sure you do this, I will be checking! I only had a timed essay from Lily today, where are the rest of yours??

1. Read the following posts

2.  Research the work of Henry Jenkins, media theorist and his ideas on convergence.

3. Ensure you can provide answers to the following key prompt questions for Media in the Online Age:
1. How have online media developed?
2. What has been the impact of the internet on Media production?
3. How are consumer behaviour and audience response transformed by online media, in relation to the past?
4. To what extent has convergence transformed the media? 

Henry Jenkins with thanks to P Ward

Some useful terms, we will have a little quiz on these next week

Henry Jenkins

Spend some time researching these links
http://www.henryjenkins.org/aboutme.html


Henry Jenkins writes a lot about convergence in the online age, exactly what you need to know about.


He is involved in The Convergence Culture Consortium (C3) which explores the ways the business landscape is changing in response to the growing integration of content and brands across media platforms and the increasingly prominent roles that consumers are playing in shaping the flow of media.


Here are some pithy quotes about his interests that I picked up when researching his work. I'd like you all to get at least two quotes of your own, think about what he is saying and how you could incorporate one of these quotes into your timed essays. 

'We need to embrace the potentials of participatory culture even as we critique the exploitative practices of web 2.0. We need to understand the ways that digital media does and does not transform the terrain upon which debates about media policy are occurring.'At the heart of Fish's account of Free Press's gathering was a question which has haunted my own recent work as well: "Is the open, decentralized, accessible and diverse internet - by which media production, citizen journalism and community collaboration have been recently democratized - becoming closed, centralized and homogenous as it begins to look and feel more like the elite-controlled cable television system?"


"My own way forwards towards these goals has been to promote what I call participatory culture, to expand opportunities for people of all backgrounds to produce and share media with each other. I work to promote media reform through advancing the cause of media literacy and defending opportunities to participate through new media channels."


Remember, you should still be following the revision timetable I gave you in your handouts before hols, here is another copy of it in case you have mislaid it.
Revision plan A2

Work for Wednesday's lesson, make sure you do this, I will be checking! I only had a timed essay from Lily today, where are the rest of yours??

1. Research the work of Henry Jenkins, media theorist and his ideas on convergence



2. Ensure you can provide answers to the following key prompt questions for Media in the Online Age:
1. How have online media developed?
2. What has been the impact of the internet on Media production?
3. How are consumer behaviour and audience response transformed by online media, in relation to the past?
4. To what extent has convergence transformed the media? 

Timed essay, use this essay plan to do a timed essay, it would be useful to look at each others afterwards. Remember to use up to date examples.

‘Without convergence the internet would be obsolete’. How far do you agree or disagree with this statement in terms of audiences and institutions


Intro: quote from David Gauntlett.
Watch his video about his new publication here and here. His new theory 'making is connecting' is very relevant to answer this question, so find a pithy quote to link to the question.


Para 1. directly address the question, define convergence. This site gives you a very academic definition which you could paraphrase and use some of the theorists names.


This site gives you a powerpoint about convergence in terms of the film industry (which you did last year).


Then there is always this easy peasy definition, Media convergence is defined as some form of cross-media cooperation, usually involving broadcast stations, print outlets and Internet sites.
But read all of them before you write!.


Obsolete means having no meaning, function or role.


So would the internet be obsolete? I would say no, but it would be extremely limited and its future in doubt.


Para 2. you need to think historically, can you remember a world without google? When the internet started you needed to know the exact URLs. The invention of search engines expanded its usefulness.


Para 3. Think about he Virtual Revolution documentary, the answer to this question is basically in that! How 20 years of the web has changed our lives.
Look at this site and watch the clips before you go any further.


Para 4, 5, 6, 8 look for examples of effectts on instution and audience from the VR and write at least two para s on each.


Para 9. Refer back to the question. Would it be obsolete? What are the implications for the future? Always consider this point, no matter what the question is for this unit. 


Web 3.0, even more convergence, cheaper, faster, digital natives, globalisation should all be mentioned. 


Email your response to me but also look at each others and consider what other people have included and how could they improve.