WHAT: We plan to make a video on social perception New Yorkers have on people based on which part of the city a person comes from. People will be approached and asked questions on what they think a person from a certain neighborhood or borough is like. A school would most like bring people together from all over the city, so we might plan to record near school. This will allow us to have more variety in sample size. The length of the video will depend on how many interviews we’re able to get when we record. It’ll be shared on some video sharing website, probably Youtube.
The way it’ll work is we’ll stop people on the street and ask them a few questions like “what do you imagine when you think of someone from Brooklyn?” After all the point of views are recorded we will create a conclusion that will reflect what a general consensus thinks about a group from each said neighborhood or borough.
WHY: A large portion of The Outsiders revolved around self image and the image being from one part of town or one economic standing can reflect the way society perceives you. With a city as diverse as New York CIty, we can probably see the same type of assumptions being made here that were made in the town of the book. Socs were thought of as better than the Greasers based on where they came from the ideas people had from each group. An average New Yorker might have the same sort of opinion based on where a person is from.
We decided to go for a video because it’s become a format that’s easily spread around. You can just click on a link and just watch. Video is also a medium that would most easily be viewed by young adults today. It’s more engaging and you get a picture of the person giving their opinions on camera. We’re also in a digital age, where the average person probably spends more time watching videos on Youtube than actually reading. There’s also the function of the comment section that allows a conversation to be made.
So what I love most about this check in is the part where you articulate your interest in the fact that “[a] large portion of The Outsiders revolved around self image.” I think self image and the creation of self image and its relation to insider/outsider or us and them groups can lead to a generative project. I also like the idea of using film/video in some way. I would like to see you push further on why the medium of video is particularly important to not only the topic of self -image, but to the topic as thought through in the novel. It seems like a major connection/rationale for using this medium would be the importance of the movie image in The Outisders. And given the history presentations of people in this group, it seems like you might also be thinking about the image of “coolness.” And then of course, there’s the lecture I gave about the pervasiveness of middle class values/perspectives in a novel that actively isn’t about the middle class, which is to ask who’s self and who’s image is being constructed in self-fashioning of our main characters? All of these points of connections are ideas you will want to flush out in your “why?” or rationale for your choices. You will want to flush them out not only because you will have to explain them in your write-up, but also because you should allow the answers to these questions help define your specific interests and refine the shape and content of your project.
Right now I have both conceptual and logistic/pragmatic concerns about the idea video taping various New Yorkers.
Some of my conceptual concerns I’ve already started to get at with the questions I’m asking above. How specifically does video taping people talking about their perspective other people get at “self image” and self fashioning? Will you be analyzing in some other way that you haven’t discussed the way people are fashioning their own identities as they are talking about other folks? If you’re thinking about self-image it seems like you want to be asking folks not so much about what they think of other groups, but about what they think about the identity of the group to which they are a part and their identity in relation to that group. Part of trying to think about that idea might entail asking folks what they think other groups think about their groups and how their group or them individually respond to what they think folks think of them.
-Additionally I’m wondering how the novel actually fits into the execution of your project? Will you preface what you’re doing with a discussion of the novel? Will you ask people if they’ve read the novel? If so will you ask what they think about the novel? How will the novel come up and how might it inform people’s responses? Also thinking about the novel, what does it mean that you’re videoing someone else? Especially in an age of selfies, wouldn’t self fashioning be more likely communicated in self authored videos? I think the mediation of an author who is not the same as the one being described relates to Hinton’s outsider relation to Greasers and Soc’s but if that’s the case your project might need to be more intentional about that dynamic.
-Relatedly how will your project engage some of the other materials/discussion the assignment says you need to engage.
Logistically:
-Video taping people brings up all kinds of logistical issues. You have to get people’s written consent to film them. And that consent has to spell out what you’re using the project for and what you won’t do with the image, and they have to sign it and have a date. You also can’t operate under the guise of doing research (one because we are not a social science class and have not trained in that) but also because you actually have institutional approval before you can conduct any kind of research on living subjects.
-How will you edit this video? (I don’t necessarily mean with what software, though that’s a good question. I mean how long of a film will you make? Are you trying to make a montage of comments or highlight character profiles?) Who is your audience for this video? How will you reach that audience? What kind of frame or introduction will you provide for that audience?
The tricky thing about projects that involve filming people is that we often mistake the interaction that goes into making the film to be the same as engaging an audience with your project. Your project is the film, which has not been created while you’re filming, so the people in the film are not being engaged by the project. They are being called to help construct the project which is not the same thing. The only differences is if your project is a kind of performance or event that I cannot attend, and you use video to document the project. Still here the video is not the project but a document of the project. If you want the video to be a document of then you have to re-conceive of what you’re doing with these strangers. What’s the project you’re bringing to them other than just asking them questions? Are you asking if they think the author of the The Outsiders was working class or rich, a greaser or soc? And then asking what they think about the fact that she was neither partly in discussion but also partly by having them draw a picture of two extreme personas that represent opposite poles of a neutral medium that they associate with their own identity?
Do you see what I’m getting at here?