Documenting Ideas. News for all.

Well, it was strange. We had to come up with a way of delivering news that was different from what we currently have. I guess I had been pushing the boundaries of the exercises slightly as of late. So now we get more defined outlines.

As we went back to our fortress of thought, riddled with dirty dishes and all kinds of disgusting features (yet the best seats in the school) we set up to redefine the concept of news itself. (Yes, i'm feeling a bit poetical after watching some Dr.Who and hearing "fire in the water" one too many times.)

One of our team members suggested that we try to tackle it in a more controversial way. It's weird but all I could think of was how news were presented in a completely non-objective and biased way in V for Vendetta. And in a way we ended up trying to do something in that style. Kind of.

The weirdest thing is: What a coincidence... That day was the 5th of November...

(Yes, that extra comma there makes my grammar-nazi senses tingle.)

We started our mandatory discussion trying to define exactly what we wanted. I certainly was aiming for something different but as a team decision, the best I can do is try to help define it. As always, I went to the computer and tried narrowing down the ideas as best I could and put them into a presentation. Its hard when we are so caught up on making and exploring ideas that we then need to go back to a few simple statements and write the down.

No wonder when we try to ground the ideas we have such a conflicting time, some of our ideas end up being contradictory by nature. And it always seems like we have a lot of time to think about things, and we end up running out of time in a flash.

In any case, our idea was that instead of delivering news in a direct and pre-digested way, we would do more of a dialog between two opposing opinions on the matter and try to make people think for themselves. Revolutionary, right? We tried to aim it as making people truly get involved mentally.

Think about it this way. If I tell you Replicators are dangerous, you might just nod and move on with your day. Maybe one day in the future you will remember the word Replicator, but won't remember if it was good or bad. If instead, I show you the struggles of Replicator Fifth and sarcastically say how loving and caring this character was, you might (if you have a curious nature) feel compelled to learn more and make your own judgement. See what I did there? If you have no idea what Replicators are and have no idea what I'm talking about, you might feel tempted to click on the links and read a bit about what those things are. (Or if you are lazy you will just keep going, if you even keep going at all.. I'm looking at you Patricia! *grin*)

The point doesn't end there. If you clicked on the links you might have learned that Fifth was a replicator who was betrayed and in turn became an enemy for the humans on a tv series called Stargate SG-1. You would have learned that indeed replicators were a nasty plague that drove the Asgard to commit mass suicide ending their existence as a race in the galaxy and they might have almost destroyed our dear Milky Way. But if you hadn't been somehow pushed into learning about it on your own, by your own conviction, (or in this case being 'spoon fed' by me in this paragraph) you would have "Maybe remembered the word Replicator, but not remembered if it was good or bad."

That was basically the point we wanted to make in class. I think we failed miserably in the execution as I believe the idea didn't get trough. It didnt help that we had quite a few contradictory ideas floating around and we were force, due to lack of time, to condense everything to have something to present.

Shame on us really. I hate bad quality work.