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Manifesto Project
For this project our group — Giovanni, Jack, Robin, Ashvin and I — created our manifesto on the consumer role in contemporary society. Within our manifesto we also made connections with the Prosumer culture that digital cultures and modern technology has enhanced in recent years.
Michael Dowdle
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“The high pitched scream of consumer selling is no more than sheer noise.”
A
s we were doing our project on consumerism in a contemporary society we started out by defining what and who is a Consumer of Culture. We then started listing different ways in which people consume information and media, mainly looking at digital cultures. We came up with things like movies, music, television, different forms of advertising and social medias. With each of these categories we looked at the past, present and possible future that it has or may have. For example, advertising has played a massive part in media of television and still does, however, people now are able to skip though many advertisements that they had to sit through before so advertisers have to use different ways to get their brand to the audience. One way this is developing for the future is social television. People can logon to a website and interact with the show or other fans. This helps create more views for the show, but also makes it easier for advertisers to target that specific audience. After some discussion within the group over the different topics we had highlighted there were a few different areas that we wanted to cover for the final manifesto, but we didn’t have a solid idea. We decided to do some interviews to find out a little more on some of the subjects we may have wanted to cover, such as Prosumers, social media, reliability of information, among others. We eventually decided that we wanted to focus on Prosumer culture. I personally found it to be an interesting subject as the internet has enabled anyone to be a musician, filmmaker, designer, journalist etc. And it’s interesting to see the positive and negative affects it has on society, industry and the generally consumer.
2
When it came to creating the final manifesto we hit a bit of a brick wall. There were a lot of different ideas floating around within the group, but we found it hard to put together one solid idea. One thing we found difficult was to balance the overall message with the form of the final piece, or whether the form would be the message.
We chose to do it this way as we thought we either wanted to create amateur looking video like ones seen on YouTube, or a more professional looking video to create the complete opposite of this. As we decided to go for the more professional look we thought the white studio setting, like that used by Apple, would be a good way to do this.
One idea I had was to create a degrading video which started out using the basic composition and audio techniques that we had been taught and has the video progressively decay to the video quality that is typical of sites likes YouTube, with shaky cameras, bad audio, no consideration or composition etc.
As far as creating this, I think we did an OK job, but personally I think the whole idea itself could have been a lot better. I think this being the first time that we had all worked in a group, rather than independently, held us back a bit as it was something that none of us were used to and I think every one of us held back on some opinions and ideas at times in order not to offend one another.
We eventually settled on creating a video which was a speech intended to be like a public service announcement that was almost preaching the manifesto that we were proposing aiming to release it as a viral campaign (which is why we posted it on YouTube). We used a more professional looking setup, with studio lighting, our camera on a tripod and our audio was recorded through a proper microphone. We wanted the video to seem like a passionate proposal while being a little tongue-in-cheek by mimicking the pretentious Apple videos.
I think it would have been more interesting to have created the video to replicate the more amateur/ homemade feel. Not only do I think this could have made for more interesting viewing, but it would have also better highlighted the point we were making in the manifesto. I would have also liked to be a little more creative with the manifesto and I think doing this would have enabled us to be more playful with the idea.
For the aesthetic we looked at some of the videos done by Apple, as well as some interviews done by FilmFour which I remembered had a similar clean look to the video.
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