Author Archives: Jianping(Alan) Chen

             I had never imagined that one day I would perform my voice on any of the famous social media platforms before starting the creative remix project. For the creative remix project, we are asked to recreate the previous two projects we did on Black Panther Party and Wikipedia gender bias as a multimedia piece such as a podcast. The goal of his project is to see how the medium we choose will affect how the message that was presented to the audience. I participated in a group with another two students, Jing Wang, and Maggie Lin. After a long discussion, we decided to use the podcast as our multimedia piece to recreate the project of Wikipedia gender bias.

            It’s interesting that at the beginning of the discussion on the medium we were thinking about using PowerPoint or virtual essay as our medium to present the project, but we eventually decided to use podcast as our medium. The major reason is that podcasts can better connect the audience to the problem compared to just plain text, in which the tone of the speaker matters does affect how the message is brought to the audience and how much attention audiences will pay to this podcast. In addition, we believe that listening to a podcast doesn’t take much attention from the audience compared to reading a long text, which means podcast is more portable for audiences to listen to compared to concentrating on reading plain text. After that, we had a long discussion on deciding between the topic Black Panther Party or Wikipedia gender bias. We considered the notability of both topics to the public; we considered the gender bias issue on Wikipedia less notable compared to Black Panther Party. Wikipedia is a well-known online encyclopedia, but its gender bias is rarely known. After all, few people pay attention to the hardship of those female editors nor the huge difference in gender ratio when they access Wikipedia.

            We decide to split the work before starting working on the project, Jing was in charge of writing the overall script, me and Maggie will be the speaker for our podcast. At first, we decided our intended audience will be the younger generation who are more used to receiving messages from social media. For this reason, we put more attention on how to attract the attention and interest of the audiences and abandoned much information and evidence we had collected from previous projects. If no one is interested in the podcast, it’s no use no matter how much evidence and argument we brought up. For this reason, we decided to create a sense of discussion between the two speakers and brought up the statistical data and experience of female editors during the conversation as supporting detail. In our expectation, conversation and the overall tone are put first before the overall structure of evidence supporting the argument.

            It’s hard to find a balance between academic tone and interestingness, which is why we end up spending most of our time revising the script. We often found room for improvement almost every time we try to practice the script, problems like too much evidence-making with so little interaction, boring tone, and stiff sentences. The time we spent discussing how to improve the part exceeded the time we used to practice the script. We decided to make the overall tone of the podcast question and answers, we can use a question to bring up the general argument and provide evidence while answering. We also tried to involve our personal experiences and opinion in the discussion and tried to drag the overall tone away from just giving a plain and neutral argument.

            We also struggled a lot with practicing the script. Neither of us has experience before presenting a long script, in which the tone and voice often get too low and weak after a long dialogue. I and Maggie decided to split the script into five small sections so that we can pause between each section to respite and prevent tiredness due to the long dialogue. After finishing our recording, we are aware of a serious problem. No one in the group had experience with any of the editing software or any experience in creating a podcast. We are learning and editing the project at the same time. During this process, we learned how to combine different clips of audio, insert an image, and create virtual effects. Even though we learned how to use the software is not enough for us, we have no idea what we need to create a well develop podcast video. We looked through other podcast videos on YouTube, but these videos involved many complex visual effects and well develop overall structure, this is something we cannot grasp in a short time. We thought of adding background music, but we weren’t satisfied with the outcome, in which the background music drowns out our voice. Eventually, we only put a background image and some virtual effects on the audio and turned it into a simple podcast audio. Common Creative Permit is a big problem when we are browsing for cover and background images, but luckily, we still found an image that was strongly connected to our topic of gender bias.

            We uploaded our final product to YouTube eventually. YouTube is the platform we decided to publish after discussion because, from our personal experience, YouTube is the most used video platform we know. Overall, we are quite satisfied with how the podcast turned out, the tone and intonation in the conversation turn out brought out the message in a way that is easier to understand by the audiences. Especially in this era of the internet, everyone is gradually losing their patience in spending time to really understand a topic.