Manipulating Audiences (Apr. 22)

At the beginning of yesterday’s class, I brushed up my biography and ran it through lextutor, along with a few other digital scanner websites. The calculations came out and I was not really sure what that meant, so for reference, I went back to my old biography from two years ago. Back then, I had only just returned back to Tokyo from China so my English was decently good. Moreover, due to the lack of English speaking in my current lifestyle I am very nervous and anxious my English level has dropped severely since two years ago. However, the readability of my previous biography was approximately 11th grade, but today I jumped up to 17the grade (above college level). I am not sure how accurate the calculator is, but seeing a clear growth in my writing was relieving. For lextutor (AWL words), my percentage went up a substantial amount which was exciting. This past year, I genuinely worked hard on elevating my vocabulary knowledge and salvage the risky state I was in. Although these are just numbers, they did help me be less petrified of casually speaking English and rose my motivation, once again. I am now transcending into this phase where I get really interested in every word I do not know that comes into my ear. I've written ample blogs on how these technological creations have changed me as a learner but little did I know they would help me gain some confidence. 

Diving into the foremost part of the class, I had yet again innumerable realizations, fascinations and opportunities to seek a new perspective. Last class, we talked about pictures, angles, what to include in the picture, and so on. Focusing on how we manipulate the audience by altering the reality was just a whole other chapter I was unaware of. Deliberately placing a professional-looking teacher, showing diversity using clothes and classroom layout, videoing students having fun at club activities were just a few of the several approaches I thought of to convey a certain message. Depending on what message the video creators (in this case the school) is willing to convey, the outcome is entirely different. This really connected to media because if two different writers wrote about the same thing but with different aims, obviously there will be different biases and we will unconsciously be affected by the standpoint of the journalist we happened to read about. When we shared our opinions with other students from other teams, I realized that we all had different messages we wanted to convey in the first place (how they want to portray the school). Nonetheless, every classmate had remarkable and divergent approaches. That is when I realized what everyone focuses on so many different factors of a video that even when we read the media, there are innumerable things to be aware of. 

Notes:

how to manipulate viewers in thinking a certain way

selective parts, convey the school

standard Hollywood idea of what beauty looks like, perception of professionalism, 

music, club activities, selected teacher, classroom, nature, modern and western, international connection, school uniform,