Role:
At the beginning of the semester we delegated certain case studies for each group member to focus on throughout the semester and to write 2,500 words each per relevant case study. We then would come together to write our conclusions, introductions and put the whole project together. My Avaaz case study role stayed pretty static throughout the semester, however my role in terms of other components within the group dynamic did shift. For instance, throughout the semester we had a lot of trouble pinning down the exact relevance of our project, we knew it was relevant we just had some issues defining what they were at getting to that point of absolute clarity about them. My function within a lot of our group meetings was to get us to the conclusions that we needed to move forward- we often had lots of discussions yet it was often difficult to take bits out of these discussions and turn them into tangible actions for us to move forward as a group. I see this role as an organising role as my job was to figure out what direction each of us should move towards, while still maintaining and sticking to our overall topic. This often became very difficult as our case studies were quite different (which was good), yet made it difficult to gel them together and to define why it was relevant? By the middle to end of semester we eventually got there with the fact that we as media practitioners have the ability to change the image of an organisation, etc. What was most difficult about this in terms of my role as organiser and attempted solution giver was that the solution was really murky and what I realised was that not everyone views media ethics as really important and that really sparked us to think how we can convince these people that it is.
Progress
Researching is always really exciting for me as I really enjoy following leads, that lead you into new and exciting adventures that really expand on all your knowledge and help you bring everything all together. This research project was rather difficult as there was never this static topic to research and expand upon like a cinema essay or the likes. We were not given a topic, but had to find our own, and ours never seemed to be static. Our project had one major topic shift from grassroots vs astroturfing to social responsibility in relation to corporations and grassroots. Therefore, it was important for me to re-structure and re-think how I was going to move forward. This was done through our brainstorming group sessions as well as thinking about key words. This was important in terms of looking and helping me search for new sources in databases, and also in thinking about what is at the core of this research, what is really relevant, and therefore being able to dissect what I really needed to research away from what was on the surface. This helped me to organise my research and find new sources. In terms of other research organising I would always make sure I summarised each source of research either using EndNote or in a blog post. Due to the amount of time given to this project it was important for me to know what areas I had covered and to re-look at key points of that research as a refresher. In terms of my strengths and weaknesses I think my main strength comes in being organised and having a wide breadth of research and my weakness comes in terms of putting all that research together, structuring it and actually beginning to write. This is always a massive hurdle for me and I have to spend days structuring, thinking and making sense of everything that just seems to be a massive muddle in my head.
Strategies:
We set out our research strategies in our original brief in which we would use primary and secondary sources to obtain our information. I always tend to research with the same strategy in mind and that is to start somewhere and follow threads. For instance, one of the first articles I read was a news article on the Avaaz website being ‘Can Avaaz Change the World in a Click?‘ in which I found some key threads to follow- one of them being clicktivsm. Clicktivism ended up being very important to my overall report as it allowed me to find the link between the media as interpreters of Avaaz and that for Avaaz to be more socially responsible it has to use its criticisms as stakeholders to make their organisation better.
Collaborative strategies are always difficult as you have to consider each other member and come to some form of consensus. Luckily with my group we didn’t really have to implement a lot of strategies as we worked quite well together. One of the strategies we put in place was that at the beginning of every meeting we all have a chance to discuss where we were up to (such as coming with an abstract of our research thus far) in our research and what we had found out. This became integral as Aysha’s findings in researching anti-astroturfing at the beginning of the semester allowed us to realise that the differentiating astroturfing from grassroots wasn’t integrally important anymore. I would definitely implement this strategy in further group projects as it allows all members to feel as though they are contributing.
In terms of my personal learning strategies it is important to be really critical of the relevance of what you are doing and often I would come to group meetings and have this brilliant idea and other people would think that it wasn’t relevant. Within, a group dynamic it is integrally important to come up with a strategy that always allows you to think about how your personal learning will be relevant to your own research and also your group’s research. I think this is really difficult and a strategy to overcome this would be to constantly think about the relevance of your project to your audience. Rachel kept pushing this and I realised that we didn’t implement this strategy as much as we should have as then we would have come up with what our project was about much earlier in the semester.
Problems:
The major difficulty I faced was in coming up with your own conclusions. When not a lot has been written on a certain subject due to the fact that it is quite new it becomes really difficult to use what you can gather and turn that into something tangible. For instance, clicktivism is a very contentious subject and therefore most of the sources were articles written pro-clicktivism or anti-clicktivism and then from this you have to figure out what is more relevant. In my essay I was originally going to simply suggest the pro-clicktivism side to the argument, but realised that it is important to objective. None of these sources are purely academic in fact they are mostly opinion pieces. Therefore, the problem comes in being super critical of each opinion and looking to contextualise these arguments. In being able to link clicktivism back to issues of authenticity allowed me to overcome this problem as it provided a more academic framework.
Another problem was that we had the impression that people would already really care about media ethics, which was soon disrupted by Eric who claimed if McDonalds gave me $5,000 to film an advertisement I would do it because I want to be a filmmaker. At this we were shocked and it became a problem in terms of our original idea to provide a criteria of media ethics. What we realised was that we couldn’t take the moral high ground and distinguish what we good and bad, but to make our relevance part really objective and give people things to question rather than providing a criteria.
Connections and Intersections
What I have learnt the most about my learning practices this semester is that having group meetings are really important- being able to sit down and discuss issues on a weekly basis is integrally important and just giving time to nut out all the little bits of pieces can only be done within a group context. From this I learnt that presenting problems is integrally useful as a lot of the time one of my group member’s would have a solution or tell me it isn’t all that relevant anyway and therefore being critical is also integrally important. All our problems made our project all the bit better as all the problems allowed us to see the flaws in our project and question what we were doing. Therefore, I kinda view our project as growing from our problems and difficulties.
In the presentation day I first had the impression that what we were saying had no relevance to any of the other projects, because it was so different. Ours was about what it means to be an ethical media practitioner whereas others discussed television, film or convergence culture. However, what I realised was that our project could be applied to a majority of the other projects. For instance, in the project about American indie films and taboo subjects there are two very different moral practices taking place. The filmmakers’s morality comes from wanting to show the truth, to show things explicitly because that’s what happens and why shouldn’t we have the freedom to show it. Whereas the classification board’s morality lies in protecting youth from seeing things beyond how old they are or what their parent’s wouldn’t want them to see. In other projects such as Australian content on multi-channels asks questions such as is it the moral obligation of television stations to show content that reflects the people that are living in this country?
Taken from our research proposal and collaborative contract we all agreed that each person of our group would focus on a particular case study, with the overall emphasis being on individually writing ‘at least 2,000 words each, which equates to one case study researched and written up per person.’ From this we divided up into four separate case studies that covered grassroots/astroturfing on a wide ranging scale from local to global. My individual case study was to be on global grassroots and from that we chose Avaaz. Even though our research has shifted slightly to social responsibilities in relation to grassroots/astroturfing my case study remains greatly the same, however with a more specific focus on a certain campaign and its analysis in regards to Avaaz’s social responsibilities within that particular campaign. This is the initial part of my role in my group, where this research will lead to a collaborative comparison to generate results. Therefore, my second role is focused on analysing and bringing my research to the group to create our critical comparison, which will make up the second half of the assignment.
In terms of progress it is difficult to define due to the shifting nature of our assignment, which through progress on a group level we have developed a better understanding of what is important in terms of astroturing/grassroots issues. Before case studies were specifically divided I endeavored in some general research into grassroots and alternative media. The main article that I pulled from was ‘Towards a Critical Theory of Alternative Media,’ which discussed that alternative media cannot be defined as simply participatory, but must embrace capitalist forms to create a critical voice of dominant society. This article lead me down the path of how we define grassroots media, which was our main issue at the beginning of our research, or more specifically how can we define grassroots media in contrast to astroturfing (these ideas are outlined here.) This I guess formed the base of our research proposal. In the meantime I began doing some simple research into Avaaz and what it constitutes, and began to draft an approach into investigating Avaaz, with some links to follow up. Through this I discovered some issues relating to Avaaz being too perfect that I could not find any holes in their grassroots approach as it seemed to be not politically affiliated with any political group, which is shown through their non-tax deductible donations, their overall approach appeared flawless. Therefore, I wanted to find cracks in authenticity. Therefore, I started to look into press releases through the Avaaz website and found a particularly relevant one from The Times London, which hacked into a few issues as well as looking at a majority of the positives as well. Within this the main authenticity issue revolved around a case with Sun Media in which Avaaz was petitioning against, and from this Sun Media claimed that Avaaz was a ‘George Soros-backed interest group meddling in Canadian affairs.’ There were also some issues surrounding ideas about ‘clicktivism’ and the promotion of something labelled as ‘armchair activism’ and the internet as being more a means of repression than this sense of global citizenship. I brought these to our meeting and we discussed forms of new directions we could take, where Aysha discovered a major problem in our research proposal being that really nobody really cared about the issues surrounding astroturfing/grassroots and therefore it was more relevant to take a business/marketing perspective in terms of triple bottom line business models in relation to corporate/social responsibility.
As viewed in the above paragraph my research process is quite linear in terms of following certain threads and links, which will lead off in new directions. I view my research as logical in terms of following threads through references in previous articles as so I don’t get lost in a muddle of information that doesn’t link coherently together. I start my research by posing questions and how I can tangibly answer those questions in terms of what research I should do, usually in reference to primary/secondary or a mixture of both. This method was put in place by our group in our research proposal. From these questions or areas of study I create a list of keywords that will focus my research, which I embraced from our research lecture. This helps me to get to the heart of what I am attempting to discover. I then begin researching those particular avenues to answer key questions and write up summaries. These summaries I then bring to group meetings for discussion and critique, where we decide where our collective research has lead us to.
In terms of specific problems, the first one as outlined above was where the flaw in distinguishing Avaaz as a grassroots organisation, which I solved through expanding my research and following different links to the heart of issues. This problem is less relevant with our new framework in terms of social responsibility, which is quite difficult to define. Therefore my main issue and our group’s main issue is defining social responsibility. We have begun to do this through brainstorming and considering different aspects of social responsibility in terms of ethical, philosophical and moral obligations and through some brief wikipedia research. Due to Aysha knowing a little bit more she has posted some links, which I will now research into. Once I have a rather tangible outline of social responsibility I believe I may come across a problem, which poses the question; is Avaaz still relevant as a case study? What do I need to look into in terms of critiquing Avaaz in terms of it’s social responsibilities? These problems I will hope to overcome through analysing Avaaz’s tactics in terms of what we outlined as a group and measuring them against Avaaz’s personal responsibilties as an organisation and the definitions or criteria which defines social responsibility and the triple bottom line framework.
Our project connects to other areas in a broad expanding manner, especially now since it has incorporated marketing. It links to studies on tobacco lobbying, which is specifically relevant to Eric, however also studies into what is social responsibility and its relationship to corporations and how we as media students can work within a triple bottom line media framework. In terms of other groups within our class our project links to theirs in terms of this whole idea of internet-based media and the impact that it is having in terms of changing media practice. For instance one of the groups in our class is looking at the prosumer, which links to our studies in terms of people/groups using the internet as a place of expression.
Note: Please follow the links to blog post examples of my research.
Blog: rubymi1.tumblr.com/tagged/hannah
References:
Avaaz 2010, “Avaaz.org-The World in Action,” <http://www.avaaz.org/en/>
Bentley, S 2011, ‘Can Avaaz change the world in a click?’, The Times.
Sandoval, M & Fuchs, C 2009, ‘Towards a Critical Theory of Alternative Media’, Telematics and Informatics, vol. 27, pp. 141-50.
Wikipedia 2011, Triple Bottom Line, Wikipedia, 2011, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_bottom_line>.
Since, our blogs are due in tomorrow I thought I would do a brief reflection on my reflexive practice so far. This semester I feel much more engaged in the course and feel that my blogging reflects this. I blog on a range of things that fit but aren’t limited to posts on lectures, tutorials, readings, making our documentary and various forms of research, which include watching documentaries and reflecting on those.
I feel that after completing True Lies I have a bigger grasp of this subject and aren’t afraid to reach out and explore things beyond the lectures, tutes and readings. I really enjoy watching documentaries to gain inspiration and have watched many that relate to our own documentary.
Even though I have missed a few of the readings I feel that I have engaged with the one’s that I have read and am determined to get on top of the rest. It is quite challenging to find time to read the lengthier readings, yet I should make a more conscious effort to read the ones that I haven’t as I feel that lots of the readings have really directed my next move and channeled how I approach things in terms of our own documentary.
Another area that I have not focused on is the Digital Dossier. I think this is mainly because I have been trying to focus my watching on documentaries that directly target homelessness as they will be more useful to our project. Also we have access and watch great snippets of documentaries in our lectures and now in our tutorials, which I have made a concerted effort to reflect on throughout. However, I probably could make the time to watch and reflect more on the documentaries from the digital dossier.
I also think I could reflect more on our group work, however this remains in Google Wave where we communicate quite regularly. I feel that I need to make more of an effort to blog on the progress of our group and outline meeting notes, etc. on my blog.
Overall, I feel that the quality of what I have written this semester has improved enormously since last in terms of engaging with the material. Even though there are a few black holes I feel like nothing that I have blogged about has been skimmed over, but explored in depth. For the rest of the semester I will work on blogging more on our ongoing group collaboration, the digital dossier and finishing off those readings.
Image reference:
Foxtongue, I’m Blogging This, flickr, CC-Attribution, http://www.flickr.com/photos/foxtongue/24720422/
