27th April, 2024
This weeks blog post will be very similar to my first round of peer feedback. Below are three beta projects, my feedback, and ideas on how I might apply my observations of their projects to my own. I decided to select beta posts which focus on media niches that I am extremely unfamiliar with. I’ve never been a big cooker, reader, or fan of pop-punk – and this made my observations all the more interesting – as I was able to find common ground regardless, and use my observations within the context of my own work.
“beta get baking… 😉” – by Issy O’Connor
This semester, Issy is using her business account in a new and unexpected way – she’s been tackling our short attention spans by making baking reels!
What struck me about Issy’s project is that she had this concept of addressing attention spans that underpinned the changes that she’d made. I’ve been making my reels pretty willy-nilly, with no particular goal in mind outside of exposure. I could bring purpose to my reels specifically by utilising voice-overs and text to help tell stories. Furthermore, I found it interesting that she did not separate her baking content from her business content – when I was setting up Instagram accounts, I opted to use a specific photography account instead of my personal account. I wonder how those opposite decisions have changed the results we’ve each seen.
A ‘Beta’ book to read – by Alana Naumovski
Please watch her Beta video, because she’s able to explain her concept a lot more clearly than I can, but Alana’s been engaging in the Bookstagram media niche. She’s been involved in the community for a few years now, so for this DA she’s specifically looking at books from Asian, POC & LGBTQA+ authors.
From Alana’s beta, I observed her very clear idea of persona and the role of authenticity in developing that persona. As you can see in my past blog posts for this subject – authenticity is a concept that occurs time and time again when researching and participating in photography. She talks specifically about bringing her more humourous TikTok persona over to her Instagram content. I’d love to test out an equal but opposite approach regarding my DA. I could upload content concerned with my professional persona to TikTok, and see how it goes on a different platform.
““NOW I’M CAUGHT IN THE MOMENT” – SIMPLY TAYLORLANI IS PROGRESSING” – by Taylor Housman
Throughout this semester, Taylor has been writing, publishing and promoting her blog posts that focus on her media niche, music (or more specifically, pop-punk music). We talked a little bit about this wonderful project and the ideas that underpin it over on my podcast.
In her beta, Taylor included a screenshot of a comment she’d made in class regarding ethical considerations. When thinking about ethics in my own project, I mostly thought about employing ethics in the process of documenting my work (ie blurring out usernames in screenshots that I post), but I hadn’t given much thought to how I can be ethical THROUGH my content and persona. I will need to do some research regarding ethics and photography – however, I suspect that it comes back to my earlier musings about authenticity.
