Web 2.0 + Fan-made vids: Applying YOUR work

See http://prodeval.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/digitisation-face-book.html and other posts on digitisation/convergence
 
The concept of web 2.0 is absolutely central to the philosophy of this exam board, and how the examiners perceive the media and your relationship to/with it. [see simple Ppts added to end]

The term is used to denote a shift from the initial top-down, static, one-way traditional mass media approach of the early web. Traditional 'analogue' media companies were swift to dominate.

Web 2.0 marks a decisive shift away from such analogue models to truly new media, with the web as much produced by as consumed by the likes of yourselves. You've all used the web for entertainment, and accessed film for research ... but you've also all created web content (blogs etc) and published work on the web.

Moreover, you've all used new/social media for:

• research (including on conventions and audience) 
• generating ideas (for this + above point: fan forums/sites especially important)
• teamworking (sharing posts, + keeping in touch with planning)
• feedback on drafts/final cuts (blog, FB, YT, Twitter, ...? your vids have been viewed by many in the US/Can/NZ/Aus/Irl, as well as various European nations, and even the likes of Saudia Arabia according to the YT analytics data)

Remember, Q1a is all about the progress from AS to A2: You can reflect on how FB + Twitter icons (+ QR codes?) became part of your A2 work, actually featuring in your products.

There are a range of theorists attached to the concept, which is useful not just for DCRUP but also the remaining 4. The term is linked to O'Reilly (2004) because he organised the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 Conference in 2004. Sociologist and postmodern theorist David Gauntlett has adapted the term to write of Media Studies 2.0, as detailed below; he argues for a new approach to research which 'asks participants to make something as part of the research process'.

To push into the top end of marks it helps to not just cite a theory, and show how it applies to your work, but also to evaluate and critique it. The following, taken from my Q1a pack which has been available on the prodeval blog since May 2011, provides you with an example of this:  

Whilst web 2.0 increasingly seems characterized by media giants providing platforms for such interactivity, the original concept was partially intended to denote a shift away from the dominance of mass media. Your work illustrates the tensions here: you’ve created new unique material, but used many mass media sites/resources to do so: Guardian for research; Blogger + YouTube … both owned by Google, which you used; Amazon, now the world’s largest book-seller, etc.

The following is also taken from this same (rather good!) guide. The point from this is that you should seek to link your work, especially how it progressed through A2, into industry practice. I give several examples below, but the MusiVidz blog is full of posts highlighting uses of new media forpromoting vids/albums etc:

AUDIENCE FEEDBACK & MARKETING – How did new media help you gain aud feedback? Discuss any issues with this. Some of you got unhelpful, even personal, comments on YouTube (& probably some spam). What about Facebook? Your blog? Vimeo? Link to real world practices: the film Snakes on a Plane made considerable use of online feedback: ‘Taking advantage of the Internet buzz for what had been a minor film in their 2006 line-up, New Line Cinema ordered five days of additional shooting in early March 2006 (principal photography had wrapped in September 2005).While re-shoots normally imply problems with a film, the producers opted to add new scenes to the film to change the PG-13 rating to R and bring it in line with growing fan expectations.’ [Source: wiki – contains more useful info] Drip-feeding rushes, pre-production news (casting etc), teaser trailers etc is all part of the film biz’s buzz-creating technique (to what extent do music vids reflect such practices? The notion of ‘premieres’ at least is prevalent: C4 often heavily trail premieres of music vids)

The web 2.0 Wiki:

The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumers) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumers) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups and folksonomies.
The term is closely associated with Tim O'Reilly because of the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in late 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specification, but rather to cumulative changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the Web. Whether Web 2.0 is qualitatively different from prior web technologies has been challenged by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who called the term a "piece of jargon", precisely because he intended the Web in his vision as "a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write". He called it the "Read/Write Web". [Wiki]

See also http://beauchampcollegemedia.com/2011/04/07/web-2-0/ which contains useful videos on this

http://www.alevelmedia.co.uk/page14.php contains the following vid, and highlights Gauntlett (writing about Media Studies 2.0), a useful theorist as he writes on postmodernism - a concept you can apply to all 5 DCRUP areas:

David Guantlett, who is a reader in Media Studies, recently categorised this term, read the full article here.  Summary points below:

• There is a leaning towards disregarding old theorists in favour of more relevant/contemporary examination of media texts
• Mash-ups now form the replacement of classic texts
• Diversion from examining Western dominated media texts
• The Web/Internet is fundamental to subject study
• Students enter the course already media literate
• A replacement of conventional research methods
• Awareness is given to the media industries competitive nature besides government & organisation, eg. Google vs China, Fox vs Obama, News International vs Labour)

Gauntlett launched his own Media Studies 2.0 website to highlight the key theories/concepts he considers part of the changed Media Studies teaching/learning environment: http://www.theory.org.uk/mediastudies2.htm



A range of further resources are hyperlinked here: http://webdesign.about.com/od/web20/Web_2_0.htm


[ORIGINAL POST BELOW]
This is an article which gets right into issues around web 2.0 (tho' its not for a media studies audience, but a newspaper, so it doesn't use theory terms or jargon); the rise of the amateur or fan film-maker and how new media is making such people (as you!) into serious contenders drawing in serious audiences...

Note: I've added some emphases (highlighted some passages in bold)

SOURCE: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/may/13/fan-films-wes-anderson-spiderman

The new wave of fan films

A couple of clicks away on the web are scores of films made by fans – by turns hilarious, ingenious and ambitious. Lurking among their makers might be Hollywood's next generation.

Jane Graham guardian.co.uk, Thursday 13 May 2010

Wes Anderson Spider-Man … 750,000 viewers and counting

Many still regard them as flatulent waste products of the socially deficient unemployed-layabout community. In most cases, they're pretty much right. But it looks increasingly likely that some of the amateur fan films that pervade YouTube and other online broadcasters will one day be cherished by movie-lovers as the formative works of the next generation of cutting-edge film-makers.