Digital Essay
First and foremost this was the most enjoyable project of the semester. The ability to show people something you love in a way that you hope they’ll take something away from it is something most musicians do (such as myself). Even better is showing people that John Mayer isn’t this soft acoustic guitarist, but can really play the blues. That being said i’ll move to the errors in my work first. I found myself trying to choose between showing and telling. I wanted to let my audience know WHY John Mayer was a brilliant blues guitarist, but also wanted them to see for themselves, and in all honestly this is something I couldn’t do in 10 minutes, or even 30 minutes if I had the time. There is just too big of a trade off explaining the methodology of John Mayer as well as letting someone see it on their own. Maybe they wouldn’t get it as I did just by listening, maybe my voice distracted them from what I really wanted them to hear.
On another note, I was not limited by content or broadcasting ability. According to Danah Boyd, we have moved away from broadcasting and into networking http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/Web2Expo.html
This is a big part of my project. I am not CNN, MTV, or any sort of broadcaster so in order for me to get my story out I needed networking ability. Thank you YouTube for allowing me to make my own content available to a larger audience.
I also firmly believe that my project is in the genre of Web 2.0. http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume43/Web20StorytellingEmergenceofaN/163262
It has a beginning, middle, and end (no matter how raw they may seem) and serves a singular purpose. To spread the gospel of the blues (not really but you get the picture). I used microcontent in the form of voiceovers, tags (titles of songs), pieces of songs, album art, pictures, and bits of video. I used YouTube for the social software aspect of Web 2.0 storytelling which also makes it easily search able thus easier to find than just keeping it on my personal computer or server.
