Creativity 30 Minute Essay

“Digital technology turns media consumers into media producers.” In your own experience how has your creativity developed using digital technology to complete your coursework productions?

                It could be argued that digital technology turns media consumers into media producers; however, I think that digital technology turns media consumers into media prosumers as people are not professional in their field just because they are able to create similar products or replicate others that already exist on the market. In order to show my view point, I will use my foundation portfolio magazine and my advanced portfolio music video.

                In my experience of creating media products with this media course I had the skill to research into products, but not how to analyse them in such a way I was able to copy their successful convention.  I have developed this skill by using the digital technologies of the internet which has enabled me to progress from a media consumer to a media prosumer. An example of this is the magazine I created in my foundation portfolio. I used the internet to research the typical conventions of music magazines and used their ideas to spark a creation for my own magazine. The conventions I researched enabled me to create a magazine with a more professional look than my preliminary magazine and developed my skills as a producer. Similarly, in my advanced portfolio, I used the internet to research into music videos which fitted in with the genre I was aiming for and used the common conventions within those music videos to make my own video more successful in being professional. This case of using digital technologies has developed my understanding of the media products concerning my course and also has given me confidence in being creative but at the same time has developed my capability to use conventions of other existing products.

                This skill of using digital technologies to research conventions of existing media products has developed in my two year course of media studies. In my foundation portfolio magazine, my skill of internet researching improved vastly. Before this course, I would research into a product and perhaps make a few notes at a push. However, during the course of AS, I used the internet to research into magazines from the Rock/Alternative genre such as NME, Q, Kerrang! and many more. After finding magazines, I would develop my ideas on a Microsoft powerpoint and micro-analyse the products to search for things such as: tri-colour schemes, rules of thirds, conventional mid-shot of subject on the front cover etc. I then applied this to my work. As I say, before this course, I would never have considered using this depth of analysis by using the internet. Again, this was the case with my advanced portfolio music video. I used the internet extensively to provide myself with the correct information in my research and planning to follow conventions where it was appropriate in order to make our music video more professional and more consumer friendly. This time, instead of conveying my knowledge into a Microsoft powerpoint, I created a blogger post and used Tubechop in order to cut snippets of the videos I was researching and analyse them more deeply than if I was just creating one long essay. I’d say that the use of internet in my advanced portfolio has made my life a lot easier as a consumer and also a prosumer as it enabled me to copy creditable conventions of videos into my own.

                In conclusion, I think that digital technology has enabled both me and my group to be creative and design things that we would never have been able to twenty years ago without the help of professionals. In today’s society, the internet is used for millions of different reasons by millions of different people. In our case, the internet has enabled us to be creative whilst still following conventions of existing media products. The internet has become far more ergonomic in the past decade and has allowed creativity, like ours, to be easily developed with the use of file sharing sites such as Youtube, Dailymotion etc. And then you can easily receive feedback from family and friends with the click of a mouse on social networking sites such as facebook and twitter. Therefore, it has now been made easy to become a prosumer, instead of just a consumer with the likes of photoshop and sony vegas; but I would argue that digital technologies do not make us producers (as that is a professional field in which you must be highly qualified) and therefore we more easily become prosumers.