Digital Literacy Snapshot - Jon Gelinas

I was excited to embark on this assignment and had many different ideas for my approach. 
Every media assignment is a challenging balance of finding the appropriate tools, platforms and style to successfully transmit your message to your audience. After finally landing on the idea of interviewing myself I choose to mimic the style of the Between Two Ferns video series. This would be a good opportunity to practice multi-cam editing skills (which are incredibly rusty and out of date). However in the final product didn't turn out as expected (my apologies for the length and I am embarrassed by the sound quality). This reminds me of the idea that every time you set out to make a movie you make 3 different movies: the movie you script, the movie you shoot and the movie you edit. I lost much of my material in the edit and it's not what I intended - so much for the movie I scripted.

Much of my video focuses on the material aspects of my digital literacy journey. Outdated physical platforms become historical artifacts that often mark a period in time when media evolved for everyone. I appreciate these historical artifacts, in part because technology moves so fast. Each year, new devices emerge to support new platforms, and much of the older physical infrastructure ends up discarded. Revisiting these devices and platforms reminded me that my old 16GB hard drive, which was top of the line in 2000, now holds less than the cheapest USB stick available today. Versions of software are ephemeral but it many ways so are the devices that provide access to this software.

It’s interesting to see how different people leverage various media platforms. A friend of mine wanted to break into graphic design and has been using free tools and apps on their phone. Though this approach doesn’t work for me, it’s been fascinating to watch them produce significant amounts of work and gain more opportunities to get paid for it. For all intents and purposes, they are a graphic designer now.

It’s important to remember that the audience doesn’t care how a product was made (or whether a template was used)—the platform really only matters to the creator. In hindsight, I know I could have produced a shorter, more direct video using an easier platform and approach but I enjoy the process and this was fun if not terribly effective. Maybe it’s finally time to embrace Canva?

Here is my video