I’m still not entirely sure I’ve done it ‘right’ so to speak. I’ve posted quite a few blogs that are not particularly enriching academically, but I feel they all make up what feels to me like a blog. I’ve reflected on all kinds of things covered in the course, as well as my course readings.

The project has made me really consider a lot of things about digital media. It has forced me to think outside of the course reading square and create blog fodder for myself. I think something like blogging really needs you to be interested in it. If you’re not you just won’t write blogs. I think that after this project I may start up a blog of some kind. Not too sure what the topic will be yet though.

To finish, a beautiful tag cloud (wordle) of all the tags I’ve used in my blog over the last few weeks!

Interesting!! I find it a little amusing that they consistently liken themselves to a mainstream news organization, whilst also claiming their individuality.

I’ll be conducting non-academic research into individual videos, that is, I’ll be looking at each one and answering questions relating to it. The questions are:

What type of video is this?

This question will be answered by selecting from a list. The categories are similar to those used by Wall in ‘Africa on Youtube’

• Tourism
• News
• Entertainment
• Political

What country is the poster from?

This question is to help ascertain the point of view of the video, or of the poster.

What kind of image does this video present of South Africa?

This is a fairly loaded question, but I think it is an important one. Key words used to describe the image it presents of South Africa will help me to see what kinds of stereotypes exist.

Hopefully these questions will aid in answering a large gap in literature. Not much work exists on the representation of South Africa online, let alone on YouTube. For this reason, the literature that I use will for more of a base for my work, with my own observations making up the bulk of the argument.

It’s fantastic to be a post-graduate student and be able to fill gaps like this! Bring it on!

Who are these girls?

Why do they make vlogs?

Has making vlogs affected their lives?

I think this project will be interesting as it relates directly to a lot of things we have discussed in class surrounding digital video and YouTube. I hope to make an interesting and informative documentary. I’ll probably end up using iMovie simply because I have it on my laptop and am able to take it everywhere with me.

Thankfully I already have 3 girls who have agreed to do the project. Each of them will present their answers to questions in a vlog format. This is a stylistic choice, and I’m really hoping it works!

In class when we used FCP I was a little wary of using it because I am an iMovie girl through and through. iMovie is familiar and safe. I know exactly how to do everything I want to do in iMovie, and how to do it as quickly as possible. I’m an active part of the video team at my church and we are always filming and editing footage of events. iMovie has simply been fantastic in this process.

However, now that I have tried out FCP, I am almost a changed woman. Final Cut Pro definitely has its benefits. I love its professional abilities. It is obviously much more powerful than iMovie (and that is reflected in the fact that iMovie is free, and FCP is expensive to say the least). There are a few things that I really need to nut out with FCP if I end up doing the documentary I hope to do for the digital project though. I need to figure out how to do better titles, because the ones we used in our group video were fairly horrible to be honest. I’m sure this is simply a case of not being familiar with titles on FCP. Also, I don’t actually own FCP so editing at home would be impossible. Final Cut Pro also has some great effects, which iMovie has too, but Final Cut just does it so much better.

Meditating on whether or not I will stick to ol’ faithful iMovie for the digital project, or whether I will make the leap into the professional realm.

Marc Prensky is the ‘owner’ of the term digital native, and he discusses it in this article. A digital native is a person who was ‘born into’ the age of the digital, using the internet, mobile phones, and other such technologies from a young age. A digital immigrant is someone who has adopted these technologies even though they were not born into the age of digital technology.

Now, there have been many arguments that digital natives are suffering both socially and academically due to their engagement with digital technologies. This research finds that by interacting online young people actually pick up valuable skills, rather than become socially inept. I think that there is a very archaic idea of the internet and digital media hanging around, and more research like this is needed to show that digital media is not evil.

I’m not sure if I count as a digital native. I mean the first computer I used ran Windows 95, and my idea of having fun on the computer was looking up interesting facts on World Book or Britannica. Really, people my age (I’m 21) seem to be kind of sitting in between the digital native and the digital immigrant distinctions. I liken this to my life, in that I was born in South Africa, lived there until I was 12 years old, then I moved to New Zealand and have lived here ever since. I am technically no longer a South African, as I have New Zealand citizenship, but I will never really be a New Zealander. I’m a sort of digital native, but sort of a digital immigrant, who is sort of South African, and sort of Kiwi. Wow! Identity crisis!

What does everyone else think (if you guys actually read this!)? Are we digital natives? Digital immigrants? Or part of a middle section that seems to be ignored?

Thinking of the digital project today.. bouncing ideas around in my head. Podcast sounds pretty cool!

I was interested in the amount of time it took to actually get this story up on NowPublic. It took about 2 weeks for it to be approved. Interesting as it seems there is still a top-down hierarchy reminiscent of big media conglomerates. Is citizen journalism really as free as we think?

In class in week 5 I was really interested in Sarah’s reading on Africa on Youtube. I read her blog and thought that I might write a blog about it too.

I was born in South Africa, a country which the world often excludes from their ideas of ‘Africa’. When you talk about Africa generally it conjures up images of the more third world countries. However, South Africa is considered a developed country and does not really fit this kind of stereotype. Or does it?

When looking up ‘South Africa’ on Youtube the first video that comes up is a video about the recently murdered Eugene Terreblanche. Besides this the videos seem to fit the general stereotype of South Africa: racism, apartheid, poverty etc etc. I think that what was said in the reading ‘Africa on Youtube’ is also very true of South Africa on Youtube. The rest of the world seems to inadvertently impose the same kind of stereotypes on South Africa. If one was going on holiday to South Africa for example and searched for it on Youtube, these videos would be a bit more of a deterrent I feel.

Now, I think that because I was born there I have a bit of freedom to speak about South Africa in ways that perhaps others may think is inappropriate or whatever. South Africa is a country which seems to hang on to its past. Apartheid is a dark scar on the history of South Africa, but it is not one that the country has been able to move past. The murder of Eugene Terreblanche, leader of the Afrikaner Resistance Movement, last week has blown this open again for the world to see. This seems to filter through into the representation of South Africa on Youtube. All the problems that arose out of the apartheid era seem to be the stereotypical representation of the country on Youtube.

South Africa is a country which I feel is still very much a part of the African stereotype. Cute example: when I first moved to NZ I was asked by numerous people whether I had a pet lion, and whether I had lived in a mud hut. It may seem ridiculous, but this is the image of Africa that is portrayed to the world, and often through portals such as Youtube. South Africa is lumped together into this stereotype.

This is such an interesting topic.. I am thinking of maybe exploring it for my research essay. Feedback would be fantastic

In class Alice and I observed a trend that the majority of major news websites engage with social media in some way. The NZHerald for example has options to publish a link to Facebook or Twitter.

Why is this necessary? Is it simply for readers to be able to share news they are interested in through different social media platforms? Of course not! If you actually click on either the ‘Facebook’ or ‘Twitter’ links, the entire story is not published through the platform. On Facebook, a small snippet of the story is linked with a picture and the headline. Through Twitter, simply a link is posted as the Tweet. It seems that the major function of this facility is to increase traffic to the original website (NZHerald website).

Stuff is actually a little bit more intense in this as it is able to publish to a whole lot more platforms:

By making the story publishable to sites such as Delicious and Digg the website can double or treble its readership.

I however struggle to always pin everything down to money (even if that is what it is all about sometimes). Do these websites really have money at the centre of this idea of publishing to other platforms? I would suggest that perhaps this is the way of keeping up with the times. I think that the fact that it increases traffic is definitely a factor, but also it is a way of making sure that mainstream news survives amongst this world of user driven content.

This leads me into the next part of this observation. Both the examined (NZ) news websites had different ways of accessing news, including through social media.

NZ Herald

Stuff

Stuff doesn’t really have huge ‘options’ graphic like the NZ Herald does, but it has this large image in the top corner:

When you join Stuff on Facebook the page is a selection of news and other interesting tidbits which fans can comment on. This is the same with the NZHerald on both Facebook and Twitter. These mainstream news companies seem to be desperately trying to keep up with the world of social media. The NZHerald and Stuff actually go so far as to separate their Twitters into different sections for each news category. Is this a useful thing? Or is news simply going to become lost in barrage of Twitterness…