Impact Of Technology

As stated by Peter Fraser, 'A broader version of conventional literacy, which enables, all visual, aural and digital forms, seeking to enable people to become thoughtful producers and interpreters of media'. From looking at this quote, I can see that there have been technological and institutional advances, within the magazine media industry, which have allowed companies to produce a product best suited for their audience. 

The first program I used that was new to me was blogger. I found I had to use this program on a weekly and sometimes even a daily basis during the planning stages of my coursework because this is where I upload all my work. It was very easy to use and is better than making a paper portfolio because it is possible to include, text, images and moving images in a way that looks professional and can be access easily online by anyone. However, I would not say it was always very reliable as I had some problems with loosing my work when drafts did not save or publish.  

The Internet was always going to be the most powerful tool through this project and without it I think I would of really struggled with the planning and presentation side of the coursework. The internet allowed me to access information about everything, get existing products to analyse for free to gain inspiration and also allowed me to use sites such as; blogger, Surveymonkey and social networking sites to share my surveys. The internet really was essential for everything I did and it allowed me to become a producer, not just a consumer, of media texts which supports what Gauntlett argued in 2001 because blogger let me reach a real audience with my work.

I also found being able to use SurveyMonkey really useful for my primary target audience. This site was also new to me and I found it really hepful because it allowed me to create many surveys and post them on many social sites to get answers and feedback from the public. This helped a lot when I came to create my final products as I knew my target audience and had a better understanding of how to reach out to them and represent them.

When taking photographs to use on my products I used a Digital SLR 5D Camera which I had very little experience with. I did not mange to take high quality photos at first as I did not know to use the manual settings and apature properly. Eventually after three lessons from my teachers and a lot of practice I became more and more familiar with it and manage to get a selection of images that looked professional enough to use, though as I said earlier this is still a skill I want to improve on.

I also used a lot of editing programs to create my products, the main one I used was Photoshop. I had used this at GCSE but felt I did not have a lot of knowledge that went beyond the basics so knew, especially after completing my prelim task, that I needed to learn a lot more about; adding images, creating documents, cropping images, erasing unwanted objects, adding text, adjusting images and working on layer effects. The more I used it the more I got used to it. I looked at websites online to find out more of the fundamentals and shortcuts. I think now I am a lot more confident with this software and I think my final work shows this because the editing all look professional.

Illustrator was another program I attempted to use, I used it when experimenting with creating texts for my masthead but in the end decided to go with a more simple design than the ones I tried using Illustrator. What I did learn about this program was it works with Photoshop and is quite similar to use.

InDesign was a very useful program that I used for finishing off my products once I had edited my images in Photoshop. I had never used it before so learned from my teachers and from watching online tutorials. What I liked about the program was how professional it could make my text layout look especially on my double page spread. I think I am now a lot more confident about using this software that was again similar in some ways to Photoshop.

Finally, I used the 5D again to film myself doing this evaluation this taught me how to put it onto film setting and use blue screen. The final evaluation edit will be edited in imovie, a program I have used before and know how to blue screen on as I did this during my GCSE. I will then post my video on YouTube or Vimeo and link it to blog which is another example of why the internet has been essential to this project.

Overall Technology has come along so much that it was my main asset throughout. With the access to all these tools such as the internet and photoshop I was able to make pieces at a professional level and share it with friends via the internet.