Mission 2 Culture:Selfies

                                                                       

BLOG 1
PROCESS
Before I picked an assignment for the second mission I had to look through each assignment and pick one that I thought I wold enjoying doing and would work to my fullest potential. The second mission was called culture. The assignments I could pick from were memes, blogging, activism and agency, personal data tracking, internet of things, augmented reality, youtubing, digital privacy, online hate and harassment: the trouble with trolling, working for the web, wikipedia and selfies.

For each topic I went through the description with it and the work that would have to be carried out for it and what needed to be done for the topic.For each topic in my my lab with Helen I went through each one and wrote out what work would have to go into the each part of the topic. This then helped me eliminate which project I would do.

The first topic I thought of doing was digital privacy because I thought it would be interesting to see what it meant and what the project would entail doing but then after looking into it I further found it to not be as interesting as I thought it would be. The topic consisted of looking into the lack of privacy people have from the digital aspect of peoples everyday. After reading a few articles I soon lacked interest in the topic.

After looking into I then looked into selfies because I thought it would be interesting to see if I could take a different approach at it and not just be about a picture you take of yourself. I wanted to see if there was a deeper meaning to selfies. This first thought initially sparked an idea to start with choosing that topic. I then further read into it and went through the articles that were linked to them. Some of the articles that I read which led me into doing this topic where called "know thy selfie" and "branding and celebrity "both articles later on helped inspire me on some topics to do on the presentation.

After I picked my topic I then logged onto my slack account and joined the selfie group which I then later formed a group with people from my class group who also chose to do the topic "Selfies".


BLOG 2
PRODUCT
For my topic I chose selfies, as I went through the topic I liked the work involved. I then went onto slack and joined the group. I took on the role of making the presentation and used powerpoint. The goals for selfies was to develop a critical understanding of selfie culture and practice negotiating and curating digital identity.

We then split up each the project into parts of 3 so we each got an equal amount of work to do.Before we done that we planned days were we would all come in and work together as a group. We set goals as group what we wanted to get out of the group project. We wanted to make sure by the end we had a clear idea of what selfie culture meant and how we could show the practice of negotiating and curating digital identity.

The titles for each slide in the project were: what is a selfie?  what are the purposes of selfies?
using selfies as a new way of communication,  when was the first selfie taken? selfie culture, negotiating and curating digital identity,  do selfies produce a sense of your identity? what factors are considered when taking a selfie?  how does celebrities that take selfies influence the way we take selfies for social media?  has social media influenced selfies?  does social media affect our mental health?. All these titles for our presentation were all brainstormed from the articles that were linked in with the "selfies" website page. We found them articles useful and helpful.

The slides I took on to do were: what is a selfie- that one was pretty straight forward to look up, I found the definition and changed it to my understanding of what is was so it was not a plagiarised definition. The next slide I done was : using selfies as a new way of communication for this I looked up what as the most common app to use for selfies as communication and the result was Snapchat. This is an app where you can communicate with your friends through the use of "selfies", I also said what it was used for which is for communicating efficiently and staying connected.

The other 2 slides I done was: do selfies produce a sense of your identity and what factors are considered for taking a selfie? For both of these slides I was finding it hard to search up information online so i thought it would be useful to go to the articles and try find information from there. I used both the articles "know thy selfie" and "branding and celebrity"

For the final stages of the presentation both group mates Jo and Solinee worked on their slides and emailed their work to me, then I put them into the presentation. The day before the presentation was due we met up and went through the presentation and looked to see if there were any mistakes with the powerpoint and if there was anything as a group we thought we could improve on.


BLOG 3
REFLECTION
The day of the presentation the first thing I had to do was email Helen the presentation so we could present it to the class group The next thing I done was upload it to moodle. Before we presented it I read through the presentation to make sure we had everything in it.

The presentation itself went well, but I think it is something I can work/ improve on as time goes on.
When I was doing the presentation I tried to not read from the slides as much but rather read key words in the slide that summarised the slide.

After we were done the presentation, Helen asked us questions in front of the class about the presentation. For example she was asking about the history and how we could have expanded on it.

After we watched all the other presentations, we then as a group had to go through and reflect on how well we think we done on our project. When we went back through our group project we analysed all parts of our project from the start until the end. We took into consideration the information we had on our project and how it could have been improved.

A few key things we looked at was the history part and how we could have gone into more detail about where and how the first selfie by Robert Cornelius was taken. Another thing we were looking at that we mentioned in the presentation was mental health. As we read what we had on that topic we thought we could have gone more in depth on mental health and the statistics to go with them, this would have brought a more factual aspect to our presentation.We also had a reference in our slide about mental health that I think we could have explained more. The reference was " When they fail to meet (these expectations) over and over again, they enter this state  of despair that can manifest in all kinds self-destructive behaviours,". I think we should have explained this quote more instead of just putting it in at the end.

When we were done discussing our grade we then proposed our grade to Helen to which she agreed to as satisfactory. We explained to her where we went downhill on our project and which areas to work on which are the ones I described above to which she agreed to. She also in addition to that thought we should have went a bit more in depth on the selfie culture.

In conclusion the project went well but I think there are areas of the project which cane be improved. Another big aspect that would have improved our project is arranging more times to come together and work on our project rather than just assigning parts and doing them.That is a major thing I learned to carry through with me on my next group project.