This semester my partners and I made an Ezine – HBANANA, which records the happy moment of every ordinary girl to motivate positive attitudes, healthy and happy lifestyle to the young ladies. Also it inspires and encourages ladies to enjoy their life from the simplest thing.
Before we started this group project, we defined distribution for everyone in the group. And I was a photographer, working closely with editor to write captions and with technician to edit photos by using Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. Because we used Instagram as a platform in our first campaign , where was that uploaded daily with photographs and captions according to the each week topic. During this process, I often used mobile phone to capture the original and happy moment in my daily life. Also, I need to make sure the goal of each post, which is able to attract the audience’s attention and invoke their emotion.
Featherstone (2009) said that now more and more people are watching Internet pod-casts, video clips and pop-ups and listening to music from their cell phones and other mobile devices. Also, media are not just more mobile and work outside the office and home, the new media are also more interactive as cheaper multi-functional devices which are enable to boost the possibilities for creating, recording, editing, storing and archiving media contents, like TV program, movies, music, images, textual data. The mobile media enhance flexibility and integration for people. This is an important reason why we chose Instagram to be the platform in our 1st campaign. As we know, Instagram just allow mobile phone to upload the photos or videos, which highly express the meaning of mobile media theory and it is a popular platform that help us easier to target our audience. So using mobile media is convenient to record the real things happened around us and easy to accessing for any where in our daily life.
However, we didn’t get the results we expected before, we can’t engage with audience effectively. In other words, the spreadability of our project is our weakness, which is “refers to the technical resources that make it easier to circulate some kinds of content than others, the economic structures that support or restrict circulation, the attributes of a media text that might appeal to a community’s motivation for sharing material, and the social networks that link people through the exchange of meaningful bytes” (Jenkins, Ford & Green 2014, p4). This means that media person should use some devices as technical sources to spread our content easier than others, like using computer, mobile phone, also effectively motivate audience to share and exchange the meanings of our materials, to spread the information and problems that we want people to recognize as much as we can. But maybe in this process, we just focuses on the topic about simple girls’ daily life by using one media platform, that’s not enough to spread. Also, this way need to take a long time. So we decided to use Facebook as platform in our second campaign, where the posts will be uploaded daily and linked to our Intstagram according to the weekly specific topic, as well as sharing useful tips of other popular lifestyle page. This way do enhance the spreadability in our media project, from 1 or 2 ‘Likes’ in one post to 4 or 5, also the followers increasing from several person to more than 20. This is not a great improvement, but we also get the confidence from this small progress.
In our group, we collaborative with each other effectively and efficiently. Because everyone has their role to do the group work and we can easier to achieve the consensus which is an essential element in forming a collaborative team (Rees 1993). We clearly know that we are a group, not an individual, so we considered any problems is based on the group benefits when we made every team decision. Also, trusting on each other is important and powerful (Tabaka 2006). We believe that we can solve any problems as a team, for example, we didn’t achieve the goal at the first campaign, but we tried to find the weakness and to explore the better solution to make an another decision. For a collaborative team, information sharing, constant negotiation and participation are the powerful tools for making well-informed, team-driven decision (Tabaka 2006). Thus we had to have meetings many times when we made this project to exchange our ideas effectively, which is a reason of forming a high-performance collaboration.
Compared with the previous work about CMWP, this project runs more professional, just like a real media person collaborating with a group. Because we needs to do a lot of research before we starting a campaign, then constantly analyze and reflect the weakness in this process, to improve and achieve the final goal. Even we didn’t get the ideal influence in our project, but to know how to reflect when we finish one task in the future is the most important. Reflection is a powerful way to make people recognizing the existent problems and modifying it effectively.
References
Featherstone, M & Yoshimi, S 2009, Ubiquitous media, Sage, Theory, Culture & Society.
Jenkins, H, Ford, S, & Green, J 2013, Spreadable Media: Creating Value & Meaning in a Networked Culture, NYU Press, New York, NY.
Ree, F 1993, 25 Tips For Teams, San Diego: Pfeiffer & Company.
Tabaka, J 2006, Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills For Software Project Leaders, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley.
Hannah's thinking space 