Medium is the Message: Reflection

Hello, and welcome back to another blog post! In our latest project, we looked at the way that media affects our lives and worldviews, daily. For the sake of simplicity, I have decided to divide this blog post into two parts. The first part will be about the project itself, and the second part will be about the spring exhibition. 

Our first keystone on this project was the media survey, and was an assignment that we filled out with the help of a family member. The survey was designed to make us think about how we interpreted media, and how it affects us without even realizing it. I think that this was a really good way to start off the project, as it was a good thinking exercise. I thought that it was an insightful transition into our next keystone. 

The second keystone was called the persuasion chart, and was a chart that we had to fill out in which we took multiple different types of advertisements and decided what their target audience was, what appeals were used in the creation of the ads, and whether they used pathos, ethos, or logos to interest the viewer.  

The final keystone was probably the biggest project of the year, as it involved not just the project itself, but also the Oregon Coast Field Study, and the spring exhibition. For your sake, I’m going to start off with the project, and then talk about the other two related events. To read my reflection on the field study, click here.

Our third keystone was centred around advertising, and our final task was to create advertisements for businesses on the Oregon Coast. We started off by doing some research on our businesses, and finding their websites. Then we started brainstorming questions that we wanted to ask our businesses.  

When we got the the museum, however, the museum staff decided not to interview us because they would rather have gone on their lunch break than take five minutes out of their day to interview us. This meant that we had to do extra research to make up for this, which made it more difficult for us to create our ads. However, we persevered, and I have to say, I was pretty proud of our finished products!

We all were rushing to finish our ads before the exhibition, but we were all able to do it in time! When we were planning for the exhibition, we had to establish roles that we would take. I was given the role of DRI, which stands for “directly responsible individual” and is the person who is responsible for most of the organization, and if something goes wrong. It was incredibly stressful for me, but I pulled through, and we ended up with a pretty good presentation at the exhibition! 

The exhibition itself was kind of crazy, as it was a struggle to find the right tables and all of the resources that were around the school that we had to use. In the end, we managed to get everything together, and set up for exhibition in time! This is us at the exhibition! I thought that I should also add that we got chipotle burritos as dinner before the exhibition, which put everyone in a good mood to present our projects to the community! Thank you for reading!

Here is a slideshow of my ad drafts!