Week 6: Project 2 Proposal

1. Concept
Our area of investigation is going to be identity, and how technology has affected it negatively. Our video will include statistics, reviews, and interviews on this topic.

2. Working Hypothesis
The inevitable development of the network society, has demanded in its core, constant innovation and development of communicative methods. Communication had a different meaning before globalization. Communication meant a phone call from a home line or a letter which reached a person 4-8 weeks depending on their location. Since communicative methods were different, it is safe to assume that relationships carried with them a different meaning as well. This has caused isolation of personal identities. Communication has changed individuality. The way we see and represent ourselves has changed vastly. Since there are more methods of expressing yourself, making friends and networks, learning, and engaging in activities with strangers; there is a misconception that communication has reached its peak. Yes communication has reached its peak, but with the loss of personal identity. According to Freud, we all have many different “persona(s)” hidden within us which only come out when a situation requires it. Persona, according to Wikipedia means “A persona, in the word's everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor”. The World Wide Web has given people more opportunities to communicate, but in return develop more personas within themselves. Hence, the network society has brought a loss of identity and isolation of individuals. This global culture is anonymous to personal feelings and the true identities of individuals. In our podcast we would like to target those people who feel that the wireless borders of the internet have caused them to lose the true essence of face to face, emotional, empathetic, emoticon-less communication, which are requirements of human nature and comfort. The computer has removed the true ways of communication, which have taken place for centuries. We would like to say in this podcast, through various points of views of people who have truly lost/hidden their true identity due to the developments of communicative technologies. We would like to ask people of different ages on how they feel the internet has brought about a loss of personal identity and true human communication.

3. Research Approach
We will be conducting field research as well as scholarly journals and articles which include recent statistics. We will be referring to journal articles, and citing them. Using statistics and research done previously by scholars and psychologists/sociologists we can back up our claim: loss of identity is perpendicular to enhancement of communication.

4. Treatment
For our video we plan to use a lot of real life, unscripted footage like interviews with people from different walks of life. The interviews will be broken down into segments that overlap each other and will be an informal questioning about how people act on the web and how they portray themselves on the internet. The concentration will be on how they willingly change themselves when they go on the internet. And if we find willing participants we might even get people to show us their personal pages and their online ‘personas’ on social networking sites like Facebook. In order to add some diversity to our video we plan to have a few animated sequences or at least a few original cartoon images like thought clouds or speech bubbles at certain points. For instance a possible opening sequence that we’ve thought about includes having a picture of a person divided with one side remaining ‘real’ while the other side is made into a cartoon with different speech and thought bubbles, that show the various identities the person has on the internet and in their daily lives. As for the sound, since our video is going to be interview based, any background music we add will be kept to a minimum so that the voices can be heard clearly. And to make sure that people understand the words spoken we even plan to add sub-titles for better accessibility. If we do have animated sequences, we will definitely add the required sound effects but we don’t intend to use much in that category as we don’t want to pull away from the interviews.

Week 5: My Team

Team Name: Unidentified

Team Members:
Annabel Yoon: Blog --> Research
Bo-Mee Song: Blog --> Research and Interviewer
Maria Rizvi: Chief Writer and editing
Pearl Desa: Blog --> Research, writing and editing
Therese D'Souza: Blog --> Filming and final editing

Initial Concept
The loss of identity and the development of multiple persona's in the essence of indivuality. The global culture has brought about many different sides of a person, but has hidden what truly lies within them. We would like to research the way in which people have been able to manipulate their true identity into multiple clashing personalities that lay within the cover of one person. The internet has become a playing field of identities through various communication networks and platforms.

Week 4: What makes a good video podcast? A Review of My Fav.

Cheating on Love
http://current.com/items/86355371_cheating_on_love

This video podcast was titled “cheating on love”. The podcast was regarding how monogamy is very difficult, and how common cheating on spouses/partners is. The video takes interviews from a few people all under different categories: married, in a relationship, single, happy in a marriage, unhappy in a marriage/relationship. The video is about one topic: cheating on love. A variety of interviews are conducted, all around the same consistent topic. What makes this topic interesting is that all of the interviewee’s had one emotion in common (regret) amidst their multiple perspectives. What makes the video particularly interesting is that the interviews conducted are on a real personal basis, and what the people say has a real emotional meaning to it.

The story covers real life symbols that affect most of us on a regular basis. Strong emotions of trust, experience, honesty, loyalty, betrayal; are all expressed first hand in the interviews which bring about direct viewer involvement. Although the story isn’t about something new, it is instead about something that has been happening for years, and that is exactly what makes it unique. It is a sincere address to those human emotions which have been taken over by the busy, fast paced world which revolves solely around the self.

The goal of the story is to portray first hand emotions. The interviews looked and felt very raw, since they gave out pure emotions on the concepts of love and cheating. Love has become a rare emotion in this wired world, where love is based on lust, on looks, and sexual attraction vs. Loyalty and personality. The one thing I liked about this video was that it didn’t have a lot of the switching and clutter-full visuals which are usually in all videos these days. The simplicity of the topic was evident in the display of the podcast and its representation. This topic didn’t need strong visuals, or abstract/crazy images, instead the full of emotion faces of experienced people were enough to transmit the message of the video. It had a beginning, middle and an end in a very unique way. The beginning included a distinct point of view which was that, monogamy is impossible today. The middle included stories about people who either cheated on or were cheated on. The atmosphere of the video is very comfortable and attaching as well. You feel interconnected with the people. An expert is also in the video, which makes the story line factual especially with the use of statistics. Real people with personal and real stories bring about an emotional atmosphere which makes you relate to these people on a personal basis. Honesty is a relevant symbol in the video, which is also a human emotion so hard to find in this cyber world. Towards the end, an interviewee expressed how honesty and communication are key factors, and another interviewee explains how they learned from their experience. What really worked in this video was how the interviews led the beginning, the middle, and the end, the entire story without explicitly saying so.