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Emily O’Brien ISLA 240 Professor Johnston 14 December 2018
ISLA 240 Final Paper
1. I came into this class with what I thought was a decent understanding of mass media and communication. I’m currently pursuing the Cal Poly’s Technical and Professional Communication Certificate Program, and many of the classes I’ve taken towards that end paid special attention to how technology and media work in tandem to produce new methods and channels for communication.
However, in those courses, I rarely had to work in a team in which every member was after the same goal, but through different means. The Multi-Media Project was the first instance in which I had to communicate and work together with people who wanted to promote the same message and values I did, but through different media. The collaborative nature of the project made me realize two main things. The first is that even if you’re trying to deliver the same consistent themes with a media campaign, the simple nature of media and how it shapes the message means that there will be variations in the message when there is a shift in medium. For example, while the blogs did have interviews to provide a more pathetic element to them, they mostly had to depend on facts and figures because those have more weight in print. Print often comes across as colder and more calculated than spoken word, especially if you’re trying to access an audience that is mostly comprised of strangers. However, in the case of the video team, their videos focused primarily on interviews and people’s experiences. This is because film doesn’t have to put in as much effort to make people feel sympathetic for others. The majority of the time people will feel more sympathetic towards a person describing their plight on camera and showing their emotions than reading about their problems in an article. Of course, that isn’t to say that text cannot make people feel sympathy towards others, but because of the limitations of the medium, in that a person has to put in more effort to associate a bunch of words on a page with a person than to associate the recorded image of a person with an actual person. Because of this, I noticed that the videos relied much more heavily on pathos in their rhetoric than the blogs, which placed more emphasis on facts and figures. This is only one way in which I observed how the medium determined the message.
This observation lead to the other takeaway I got from working in a team: that campaigns need to have different teams that focus on their own medium if the campaign is to reach the widest audience possible. Wag the Dog helped introduce this idea, but working on the campaign is what made me truly understand it. Because different media creates different messages, an effective campaign should use many different types of media, as each one appeals to a different audience. Let’s go back to my comparison between the blogging and video team, and how their respective media leads them to prioritize different rhetorical strategies. If a person is more easily swayed by facts than emotions, then they are more likely to respond to the blogs than the videos. However, if our campaign only used blog posts to promote its message, then that would turn off audiences who respond better to appeals to emotion than cold facts. Therefore, if a campaign wants to cast the