Week 5 Activity 5 - Comparing Video and Text for the same message

Week 5 Activity 5 - Comparing Video and Text for the same message

Now that you have read O’Reilly’s article explaining Web 2.0 and viewed Wesch’s video, we would like you to compare your reactions to these two different ‘texts’ – the written text and the video text – and how the two different media forms affect the way you as the audience receive the messages encoded in them.
How do you think what you have learned is affected by the form of media in which the ideas are represented?
I think what I have learned is significantly effected by how the ideas are represented. For me, reading the printed text was harder than watching the video. This reflects what Saloman found when he did research with children, in the watching a video is less challenging. But he did also state that you don’t use the brain as much as you would with the printed word so perhaps you don’t learn as much or as deeply.
I liked how Wesch used the medium he was telling us about to represent the knowledge, it does seem a bit conflictual to use print to talk about non-print concepts as O’Reilly’s article did.

However, because I read O’Reilly’s article first, you could say that Wesch’s video was being watching with the knowledge from O’Reilly already acquired and that the video was simply reinforcing or helping me to conceptualise the information in O’Reilly. It’s evident from our discussions that Saloman is correct that in what ever media you are practised in interpreting, you will learn the most from (your capacity to interpret) and for me, I know that I have become lazy at reading and do it rarely and the TV and internet take my focus most of the time when I’m not being a mum and housewife! I need things to be short and to the point.

What elements of the video are not present in the written text? The elements in the written text that were in the video including being able to move the text around and edit the text to really reinforce the message to people who are used to viewing and using computer based word processers. Using the HTML background for some of the text narration was useful as it helped you understand what HTML was. Whereas O’Reilly’s article assumed a lot of prior technical knowledge of computer technology which you had to try and comprehend yourself or through other research/ discussions as Frauke did with her husband for Activity 3.
The video not only narrated a message, but showed you what each statement meant too.

Are there aspects of the written text not available in the video? What are they?

The aspects from the written text that were missing in the video were the detail about –
· the comparisons between old web and web 2.0;
· the concept of web 2.0 being about companies with Web 2.0 characteristics;
· the concept of being a service provider and not just a “web site”;
· The strategy a company must adopt to be considered Web 2.0.

Kathy Doncastor writes: -

the video gave an experience of Web 2.0 technologies, while the O'Reilly article discussed them, ie the first *was* the message, was an exemplar of Web 2.0 technologies, and the second was *about* the message of what Web 2.0 is.

I wrote:

Me too, I have reflected on how I wonder if the message would have been different if I had not read O'Reilly first, and just watching the video and how if I'd not seen the video with the sound first, how different I would have really felt about it without the sound. Your point about how O'Reilly gives us the message and Wesch gives us the about is, you could say, the Acquisition metaphor in practice. O'Reilly - the AM and Wesch - developing our understanding of what we have acquired - the conceptualisation metaphor perhaps

. Kathy Doncastor writes

in contrast, the article used text to build a linear argument through the flow and sequentiality of one thing following another that text's linearity allows. It backgounded text itself and foregrounded *content*.

I wrote:

I thought the video was quite linear and sequential as well. It painted a very interesting picture and linked each narration well giving the viewed a good understanding of the message by the end. But you're right in that the print gave us more context and background.

Doncaster, K. (2009) H800 les6 09 Week 5 9 March 2009 12.94