Media Studies: January 2012

Tuesday, 24 January 2012

Media in the Online Age - Topics

In this post, I'm going to keep a record of all the topics we cover for the Media in the Online Age question so that you can quickly remind yourself of what we've done and check what you need to revise.

'Stop the Press' - Money Programme

This report was on the decline of the newspaper industry. I gave out photocopies of typed notes on the programme. We then split into pairs and researched areas such as: circulation; Murdoch's Paywall; technological changes affecting newspapers; and new platforms (e.g. iPad). This research is available from me in electronic format.

2. 'Tomorrow's TV' - Money Programme
This report examined the success of the UK television industry in exporting programme formats and we saw how production companies such as Fremantle Media, BBC and Granada are now making programmes overseas. We also saw the challenges facing television in the digital age where there is increasing audience fragmentation. Use the notes we made in class to revise.

3. 'Title Fight' - Money Programme
This report showed how the digital age is transforming the way we read and purchase books. The issue of range and choice was a key discussion point and led us into an introduction to The Long Tail. Amazon is a trader that is very useful to consider when examining the book industry and The Long Tail. Use your typed notes to revise.

Monday, 23 January 2012

Megaupload file sharing site shut down by the FBI

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16642369

Some useful recent Roy Greenslade blogs

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2012/jan/19/paywalls-local-newspapers

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2012/jan/18/slybailey-trinity-mirror

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2012/jan/09/charging-for-content-financialtimes

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2011/dec/29/clay-shirky-digital-media

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2011/dec/19/newspaper-closures-advertising
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2011/12/institutions-confidence-and-the-news-crisis /

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2011/dec/09/national-newspapers-abcs

You can read what Roy Greenslade is saying about developments in the media, and especially newspapers, each week in the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/media
There is lots of good media info here, quite apart from Greenslade's blog. The Times site also used to be a great source of media and technology news but it's now behind a Paywall!

http://www.nma.co.uk/4000071.article?cmpid=NMAE01&cmptype=newsletter&email=true
The Guardian's digital strategy.

AS Brief

Main task: the titles and opening of a new fiction film, to last a maximum of two minutes.

All video and audio material must be original, produced by the candidate(s), with the exception of
music or audio effects from a copyright-free source. Both preliminary and main tasks may be done
individually or as a group. Maximum four members to a group.

OCR Media Studies specification PDF

http://www.ocr.org.uk/download/kd/ocr_9646_kd_gce_spec.pdf

AS Foundation Portfolio - Evaluation Questions

Evaluation:

In what ways does your film use, develop or challenge the forms and conventions of existing films, such as the ones you were influenced by?

How does your film represent particular social groups?

What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Who would be the audience for your film?

How did you attract/address your audience?

What have you learnt about technologies from the process of constructing this project?

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the main task?

Remember to explain what your individual roles were within the group.

Wednesday, 18 January 2012

Wikipedia's protest against U.S. attempts to restrict Internet freedom - 18/01/12

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h2dF-IsH0I&t=15

A2 Exam - Media in the Online Age (useful blogs from Pete Fraser)

A2 Exam - slideshow on Media in the Online age (Pete Fraser)

http://petesmediablog.blogspot.com/2010/03/media-in-online-age-presentation.html

A2 Exam - How to structure an answer to the 'Media in the Online Age' question

Here are the January questions for this topic (click on image to enlarge)

At the top of the paper, for all topics, there is an instruction that you need to refer to the past, contemporary media and future possibilities and that you should use case study examples to support your arguments. You also need to have some reference to media theory and to refer to examples from at least two media areas. Since 20 of the marks are for explanation, argument and analysis (EAA), twenty are for use of examples (EG) and 10 are for use of terminology (T), you can see that this is not an easy task. In this post, I am going to try to show how you can make the most of your material (including examples from previous posts on this blog) to do a good answer.

So how would we go about answering these questions? Links refer to examples used previously on this blog so you can read more

Step 1: Identify what the question is about.

Exam questions are often written to a bit of a formula- 'to what extent...' 'how far...' '...discuss' - you'll see these a lot in G325. what they are all doing is asking you to consider a debate and to look at both sides of something, not just to prove a point. So when Q.8 asks for a discussion of whether the impact of the internet is revolutionary, it is not setting it as a statement of fact, but asking 'how far' this is true. Similarly, q.9, which refers to distribution and consumption, is asking whether the internet has made these things very different. So there are similarities between the two questions, though the second one gives you more to tie your answer to, where the first one is quite open. In both cases, though, what you use for case studies is really open to your choice!

Step 2: decide which of the two questions to do

Step 3: note down a plan, with the main points you want to cover and the examples you want to use. Break this down so you cover all the areas needed

Examples
Media areas x2 or more
Which theory/critics to reference- it just means whose ideas do you want to mention
Main arguments
Past?
Present?
Future?
terminology

If you run out of time, the examiner can at least give you credit for where you would have gone.
remember, you could answer this section before you do 1a and 1b if you want.

Step 4 Write an Intro

keep it short and simple. for example- 'In this essay I shall consider how far web microseries and internet memesdemonstrate the changing nature of distribution and consumption of the media'

This intro already uses two bits of terminology (microseries and memes) and shows you are going to address the question (distribution and consumption).

If you know that you are going to use the ideas of contemporary critics, you could go on to say 'I shall refer to the ideas of David Gauntlett and Michael Wesch to consider whether the arguments they make about Web 2.0 really do suggest that the media has changed dramatically.'

Step 5 get on with it: case study 1

this is where you discuss your first example- microseries. First define the term. Second, outline some examples and show what their conventions are (episode length, typical content, how distributed, type and size of audience). Third, start to suggest why this might be something different from TV (no scheduling, small budget, no big institution making it- sometimes, watch anytime, chance to comment or even interact) for the audience. Draw upon Gauntlett to contrast this kind of production with conventional Tv production/distribution. Maybe note that actually some of this stuff is made by big companies anyway...Note that in drawing comparisons with TV you have addressed your second media area, the web being your first.

Step 6 case study 2

your second example- internet memes. Define the term, outline some examples and how they spread (via social networking, youtube, viral e-mail etc). talk about how they evolve as other people make new versions of them (see the coppercab videos and click on various links on youtube to see this evolution in action). Bring in Wesch's ideas about how these spread (the first five minutes of his video talk about numa numa guy as an example).

Step 7 pull your ideas together, preparing for conclusions

... an attempt to ensure that you explicitly address past, present and future and that you argue with the critics rather than just accepting their view.

make some points about the audience changing - we spend more time online, informal distribution of media is growing via social networks and e-mail, maybe some of us make stuff ourselves to distribute (as Gauntlett and Wesch suggest). Maybe speculate that this could grow even further in the future. But... the sting in the tail is that Tv is still going strong, these online communities we belong to are still owned by big companies and much of what is being consumed is actually just transferred from one medium to another; Wesch argues that it is all getting more democratic, but is contributing to memes really democracy in action or just a form of play with no wider significance? Gauntlett's 'the media were like Gods..' - has that really changed? were audiences ever as passive as his model characterises them? Are they really that much more active now? isn't it just a tiny percentage who actually make stuff to put online?

This essay model just uses stuff from a few of my posts. You could take a totally different approach, using other posts as a starting point- for example talking about collaborative texts as a new role for audiences or about the changes to the music industry illustrated here and in much more detail here. Or you could answer the question about revolutionary change by reference to technology and consider whether it makes any difference at all.

Remember- your choice of case studies is up to you. What you know about them and how you are able to relate them to ideas is where the marks come in!

A2 Exam - How to answer the question on Media in the Online Age

here is a good piece on online games and the kids' market- notably some info on Club Penguin, which has been the subject of very interesting research by Jackie Marsh.

And for news, a blog by Roy Greenslade about how online news is still largely dominated by the same news outlets as before the rise of the web.

As we saw on Sunday, these are the previous questions set for this topic:

“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 them here. 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 technologyhere and on how audiences are collaborating to make videos online here 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

A2 Exam - past questions

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

1a

Please see here: http://howardschoolmedia.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/past-questions-for-q1a-critical.html

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.

Analyse one of your coursework productions in relation to the concept of audience.

Analyse media representation in one of your media productions.

Explain how meaning is constructed by the use of media language in one of your coursework productions.

Analyse one of your coursework productions in relation to the concept of narrative.

Section B

Media in the Online Age

“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.

Discuss the extent to which the behaviour of media audiences has been transformed by the internet. (June 2011)

"This is the age of the prosumer - where the consumer becomes the producer." Discuss. (June 2011)

Evaluate the ways in which media audiences have benefited from online media. (Jan 2012)

The online age has led to competing theories of cultural change. Which do you consider the most relevant to the media and why? (January 2012)

"The online age has significantly changed consumer behaviour and audience reception compared with the offline age". Discuss. (June 2012)

Evaluate the ways in which media producers have taken advantage of convergence. (June 2012)

How significant has the internet been to media audiences?

Discuss the extent to which the internet has transformed media production. (Jan 2013)

A2 Exam - How to answer Q1(b)

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. Here are some links to some starting points for theories:

general intro

presentation on reception theory

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 Bordwell and 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.

A2 Exam - How to structure an answer to Q1

The first steps for these two questions is to read the instructions! You also need to consider the number of marks available relative to the time for the exam as a whole. It's two hours long and worth 100 marks, so a 25 mark question should be completed in a quarter of that time (30 minutes). that's how long you should devote to each of these questions. If you prefer to do Section B (the 50 mark question) first, that's fine- you can answer questions in any order. Just make sure you do answer all three and you devote the right amount of time to each.

So in terms of instruction, the main things to note here are that for 1a you write about ALL of your work across the course (and you can write about anything else you might have made on other courses or in your spare time too!) and for 1b you just write about ONE of your productions. Try not to overlap too much, so that each answer is different.

1a is entirely concerned about skills development, but the area that comes up will be quite specific. So as you can see, in January, it was about development of skills in research and planning; the other areas which can come up are skills in:

digital technology use
post-production
use of real media conventions
creativity

It is possible that a question might refer to two of these categories, so be prepared to talk about any/all of them!

a few tips on what they mean:

digital technology refers to hardware, software and online technology, so the cameras, the computers, the packages you used and the programs online that you have worked with. It is worth considering how all this inter-links.

post-production would actually fall under digital technology as well, so if that comes up it would probably represent an expansion of points you'd make in one section of digital technology. It is really about everything you do after constructing the raw materials for your production; so once you have taken photos and written text, how do you manipulate it all in photoshop or desktop publishing for a print product or once you have shot your video, what do you do to it in editing.

research refers to looking at real media and audiences to inform your thinking about a media production and also how you record all that research; planning refers to all the creative and logistical thinking and all the organisation that goes on in putting the production together so that everything works and again gives you the chance to write about how you kept records of it.

Creativity is the hardest one in many ways because it involves thinking about what the creative process might mean. Wikipedia describes it as "a mental process involving the discovery of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the existing ideas or concepts, fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight." For your projects it might involve considering where ideas came from, how you worked collaboratively to share ideas, how you changed things or even how you used tools like the programs to achieve something imaginative.

Use of real media conventions involves consideration of other texts that you looked at and how skilfully you were able to weave their conventions into your work or ways in which you might have challenged them.

You will notice that most of the above were areas that you covered in the evaluation task at the end of each of your productions. This time, you are putting together ideas from evaluations and standing a bit further back to look across your production work and reflecting on how you developed across the course. You should feel free to acknowledge weaknesses and to reflect upon how you learned from them and how you overcame problems. It is not a place to be defensive about your work but to really reflect on it!

so how would you organise an answer?

paragraph 1 should be an introduction which explains which projects you did. It can be quite short.

paragraph 2 should pick up the skill area and perhaps suggest something about your starting point with it- what skills did you have already and how were these illustrated. use an example.

paragraph 3 should talk through your use of that skill in early projects and what you learned and developed through these. again there should be examples to support all that you say.

paragraph 4 should go on to demonstrate how the skill developed in later projects, again backed by examples, and reflecting back on how this represents moves forward for you from your early position.

paragraph 5 short conclusion

Remember it's only half an hour and you need to range across all your work!

Question 1b

I like to think of this question as being about moving a couple of steps away from your production work and imagining you are someone else looking at it for the first time. How would you analyse this music video, this magazine or whatever? Imagine you didn't make it but that it is a real media production.

Again the question will specify an area/concept for you to apply. The areas that could come up are:

Audience
Narrative
Genre
Representation
Media Language

For each area there are theories or ideas which your teachers will have introduced you to which you need to know a bit about and then you have to apply those ideas to ONE of your productions and analyse it accordingly. Decide in advance which piece you will write about and make sure that whatever the concept, you can actually do it. Again, here is a bit of a breakdown of what the five concepts might involve.

Audience can refer to how media products target audiences, which audiences actually consume media products, but most interestingly how media audiences actually read or make sense of media products and what they might do with them. There is a lot of interesting material on all this and you should certainly be familiar with some of it.

Genre is all about the ways in which we categorise media texts. Whatever you have made will in some way relate to other examples of the same genre, whether it be in print, audio, video or online. Again a lot of different media critics have written their own 'take' on genre and this would be useful to apply to your work.

Narrative is about how stories are told. Applying different models of narrative structure to your work may reveal unconscious things that you did in the way you have constructed it. Again a familiarity with some of these models or theories will be helpful in the exam.

Media Language is probably the most open one if it comes up, because it allows you to talk about the other areas as well (genre, narrative, audience) as it is about the techniques and conventions of different forms of media (how shots are organised in film, how text is laid out on a page).

Finally, representation particularly focuses on the ways in which particular social groups are presented back to us by the media. So in your case how have you portrayed young people or females or males in your work? what messages are implied in what you have constructed and what would particular types of criticism (e.g. feminism) make of it?

so again, how do we write about this in half an hour?

para 1 Intro: which of your projects are you going to write about? briefly describe it

para 2: what are some of the key features of the concept you are being asked to apply? maybe outline some of the theories briefly

para 3; start to apply the concept, making close reference to your production

para 4: try to show ways in which ideas work in relation to your production and also ways in which those ideas might not apply/could be challenged

para 5; conclusion

Labels

Tuesday, 24 January 2012

Monday, 23 January 2012

Wednesday, 18 January 2012