Autoethnography and Akira

Akira is a 1988 drama/thriller where a ‘secret military project endangers Neo-Tokyo when it turns a biker gang member into a rampaging psychic psychopath who can only be stopped by two teenagers and a group of psychics’ (IMDB).

I wasn’t looking forward to this film as it isn’t something I would normally watch, however I actually found it kind of interesting. As part of my research for live tweeting, I came to learn that there is continuous talk of turning this film into a live action, showing just how timeless and popular this film is.

The standout part of the film for me was the brother-like dynamic between Kaneda and Tetsuo. I found it interesting that this dynamic, in my opinion, eventually leads to the need for power for Tetsuo. Where Kaneda is always looking after him, he finally feels the need to break away and take more control for himself, showing Kaneda that he can look s need Kaneda. On a much smaller scale I would call this an argument between siblings.

Autoethnography is not a term I had heard of before taking Digital Asia this semester so I was very confused as to what this meant. After week one, my understanding of this term is; taking cultural background and personal experience and using them to influence research. According to Ellis et al (2011) ‘Autoethnography is an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno).’

After researching this topic, I have found that a major part of autoethnography is being able to understand your own feelings, reactions and motives and how these influence what you think or do in certain situations. This is called reflexivity. Anderson (2006) defines reflexivity as ‘the researchers’ awareness of their necessary connection to the research situation and hence their effects upon it.’ For reflexivity to happen, there must be a connection between ethnographers and their settings as it entails a desire to better understand both themselves and others through examining actions and perceptions (Anderson, 2006). As ethnography involves personal experience, good reflexivity is important for ethnographers.

So far, my understanding of ethnography is limited to what is written above, however as we explore this concept in more depth throughout the semester and in the digital artefacts, my understanding will grow.

Reference List

Anderson, L. (2006) Analytic Autoethnography, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 373-393.

Ellis, C., Adams, T.E., and Bochner, A.P. (2011) ‘Autoethnography: An Overview‘, Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12:1. Available at: http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095

 

 

The Host (2006)

And we’re back for another session of live tweeting!

This is not the first time I’ve experienced live tweeting, so going into this seminar I knew what to expect and was prepared to share my opinions and engage with others.

In the seminar, we screened The Host, described as ‘horror thriller, a political satire, a dysfunctional family comedy, and a touching melodrama’ (Emerson, 2007).

This is not usually the type of movie that I would watch, so I was both excited and doubtful. By the end, I was surprised by how much I actually enjoyed it. Culture would have played a huge part in this outcome as well as the direction of my live tweeting and how I engaged with other viewers in the Twittersphere.

Now my obvious cultural characteristics would be an Australian student with a heavy Italian background but this isn’t the only type of culture that would have influenced how I perceived this movie. Part of my culture would include the importance of family relationships and friendships and the emphasis placed on certain qualities like creativity, loyalty and trust. I would also consider my part time job at Woolworths as an important part in shaping my culture. It’s this personal framework that guides my perceptions and opinions of this film.

Due to the importance I hold for family relationships, I was able to relate to the main characters that make up the family. The themes of dysfunctionality but also loyalty and teamwork were the stand out themes I saw in the film. My attention was focused heavily on these relationships and was shown in my live tweeting. I found that the film portrayed a family that was evidently dysfunctional and had their fair share of issues and arguments but were there to help and were supportive during the emotional times.

https://twitter.com/nc962_uow/status/1156370608478801920

The other stand out theme was the focus on the sister of the main character, an Olympic archer. With this being highlighted during the beginning of the film, it made no sense to me that the other family members would not let her have a weapon against the monster. Within my Italian culture, there are still specific ‘gender roles’ but living in Australia and therefore primarily adopting Australian culture, this made almost no sense to me. In my day to day life and specifically in my part time job, the idea is: whoever is best for the job gets the job. The idea that she wasn’t allowed a weapon was just frustrating. After reflecting on the film content and background I came to realise that in Korean culture it is the men who look after and protect the family. So, where I saw this as unequal, it is really an accurate reflection on that culture which is different to mine.

https://twitter.com/nc962_uow/status/1156359107395239936

Reference List

Emerson, J. (2007). The Host. Reviews. 1 Aug 2019. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-host-2007

New On Netflix USA. (2019). The Host (2006) on Netflix USA : New On Netflix USA. 1 Aug 2019. https://usa.newonnetflix.info/info/70059029

 

#livetweeting Round 2

The feedback I received from the last round of tweeting suggested I prepare before the screening and pre-write some tweets. Another suggestion was to find academic sources that are relevant to the weekly screenings. I took this feedback and used it to make the second round of live tweeting a better experience and more successful. I also took techniques that I did well in that last round of tweeting and continued to do it this round.

I found that I was commenting a lot more and had a lot more thoughts on the films this time round. I also was able to respond better to other people’s tweets and engage more in commenting rather than likes and retweets, which I relied on a lot for engagement previously. I think this is a result of pre-writing some tweets as it meant I had more time to engage in other peoples posts and thoughts.

Below are some examples of threads that I was engaged in.

https://twitter.com/abbypoposki/status/1128801110578221056

https://twitter.com/nothandomoyox1/status/1128794810213474304

Responding to the feedback, I used this round of tweeting to look into academic sources that relate to the film’s themes. These types of tweets got a fair bit of interactions which surprised me. I struggled to find academic sources in the first couple of screenings but as I began to understand the themes present in the film’s I was able to use draw on those for relevant sources.

I also tweeted a lot of popular media as I did in the last round of tweeting because these usually got a lot of interactions. Sometimes I found a good article and shared it and it didn’t get a lot of interaction. I would find popular media sources and pre-write these tweets before the screening.

This time I tried to include questions and thoughts on themes in my tweets. Some of these I came up with while doing prior research on the screening and some I wrote during the screening based on content that others were posting and new themes that I would notice in the movie. Some didn’t get the engagement I would have liked, as my intention was to. start conversation, but still drew some response.

There were a few tweets that didn’t get a lot of interaction. Some of these tweets I was surprised about because they were similar to other tweets that I wrote that did get a lot of interaction. A reason for this could be the wording, especially when tweeting popular media and academic sources. I found it hard to make the tweets for these sources more interesting and attention getting.

In order to keep up with the films current content I also tweeted GIF’s and memes based on what I thought about events in the films to get interaction. Sometimes these got a fair bit of likes and sometimes they got no interaction at all. I think that in some cases this depended on the timing of the tweets.

Overall, I think I did a better in this round of tweeting. I interacted more with comments rather than relying on likes and retweets. I found that researching the film and pre writing some tweets was helpful because I was able to spend more time interacting with others and writing about the themes of the film during the screening and posting academic sources and popular media in between. While I improved on commenting more than last time, I still think that I could have interacted more through commenting and will aim to improve in future subjects that require live tweeting. I could also do better with the wording of my tweets to make them more interesting and attention grabbing which I will aim to improve in future subjects.

An Update on the Future of Space Travel

The future of space travel is a website that I have started for my BCM325 digital artefact. Taking feedback from Twitter, Reddit and the comments on my pitch, I have developed a website that includes posts on Space travel depicted in movies and my thoughts on common questions about space travel in the future. Coming soon will be podcasts and other blog type posts with more content from fantasy media such as movies and video games and current media on new developments and what this means for space travel in the future.

Always welcoming feedback so feel free to have a look and let me know what you would like to see! https://curiousstudent.wixsite.com/spacetravel 

#LiveTweeting

Source: https://www.ticketbooth.com.au/ticketing/blog/promote-your-event-by-live-tweeting/

To be honest, Twitter has never really been a platform that I used outside of uni just because I am not really interested in sharing my thoughts publicly, so I was kind of nervous. Not only had I never live tweeted before, I also hadn’t used Twitter in over a year so I was also out of practice of tweeting in general.

My goal was to do a mixture of facts that I had found prior to the screening and then observations that I made but this didn’t always happen. This was mainly because if I wasn’t interested I didn’t follow the film enough to make decent observations and then relied mostly on facts.

I got a little bored watching Metropolis so most of my tweets were facts from wikipedia and other websites. I mainly tried to look for facts about the movie that I could tweet because I thought those tweets would get the most response but I was wrong. I found that my most prominent and successful tweets were about how confused I was.

https://twitter.com/nc962_uow/status/1103413192959516673

From seeing other peoples tweets I learnt that memes gained a lot of response so I tried to incorporate them into my tweets.

Week two was a pretty bad week. I didn’t get as much response as I would have liked. I think it was to do with the fact that besides liking and retweeting other peoples tweets, I didn’t really engage in any threads or make any comments. I was so overwhelmed by how much insight other people had on the movie that I didn’t know what to comment and was a bit scared that I would say something wrong or stupid.

I relied on facts that I found on the internet about 2001: A Space Odyssey for tweets and got some likes but not as many as some of my tweets from week one. This tweet got a response which was awesome, probably my best tweet from week two.

The screening of Westworld was a dud week for me in tweeting because I was honestly so into the movie that I kept forgetting to tweet about it so I relied on facts that I had looked up before just so I was tweeting and my interactions were mostly just liking.

By week four I started interacting more and because of this I got more interaction on my tweets. Because I was paying attention more to the films I actually had some insights and thoughts to tweet about and was able to engage with other peoples tweets as well.

I was honestly proud of the comment on the thread below because it was probably the first time that I actually had something to say in response to someone else’s thought. It didn’t get a response that maybe would have started a conversation but it got a few likes.

I was very proud of this tweet from Bladerunner because it was the first time that I actually had a question to ask in regards to the themes of the film and I got a few retweets and likes but I was hoping for some comments that would start a conversation. I think the lack of engagement was due to timing and that I tweeted this towards the end of the movie when the interactions and tweets were slowing down.

I was disappointed that the two tweets below didn’t get a lot of response because I was actually proud that I had these insights about the film. I was looking for conversation when I posted them and I didn’t get that. I’m thinking it was to do with the fact that I had just started engaging in threads so others weren’t really engaging in mine yet but hopefully if I engage more then i’ll get more response in the future.

Week six was pretty average for tweeting, but it was the first week that I didn’t have to rely on facts from the internet for content which I think shows progress in my live tweeting abilities.

I also participated in a thread that ended up including four other people and gained a lot of engagement from a lot of people through likes and retweets.

Thread: https://twitter.com/ProtagonistPink/status/1116123093850656768

Overall, I think that there was definitely a growth in my live tweeting abilities and my interactions are slowly getting better. I need to work on commenting more and engaging with others and hopefully this will result in more engagement in my posts. I think I will research more about the film before the screening to find themes that I can talk about. I also want to use more media such as GIFS and memes to make my content more interesting because from previous weeks I think this gains more engagement.