Goudy and Hudson Critical Making Portfolio

Society is increasingly relying on technology to maintain relationships, make business transactions, and interact with the world. People are hiding behind screens instead of participating in face-to-face conversation. Romantic partners can be found attached to their cell phones in public on dates. Students shield their cell phones underneath desks or behind laptops to stay connected on social media while in the classroom. Corporate workers are constantly refreshing their emails and glued to their phone to keep up with the chaos at work, perhaps even when they are on vacation with their family. Family time has evolved into gathering around the television for a sporting event or to watch a television series, limiting communication among family members. Through our video project, we hoped to display a timeline of communication technologies that show how technology has evolved over the years and how new generations depend on technology to take the place of personal interaction.

Video Clips

We used both video and audio footage to create our project. In the beginning, the audience will watch a short clip about the various telephone technologies that have been created over time. This is a fast clip that has multiple famous actors answering their telephone and mobile phones. Subsequently, our video plays different communication technologies. We set up these technologies in a chronological order from the earliest inventions to the latest inventions to demonstrate the advancements in communication technologies. Each technology was specifically blurred so that a person was interacting with an ambiguous technology device. We set these blurs to fade out over the frames so that the audience can eventually recognize the communication technology once the blur disappears. The communication technologies were blurred to evoke the attachment people have with communication technologies. These attachments stem from a reliance on technology to complete a task or facilitate communication between people. We expect that throughout the video, the dependence people have on communication technology will be highlighted for the audience.

Audio Clips

Audio footage was also incorporated into the video footage. We wanted to use audio footage so that our desire of reaching the audience with the idea that communication technologies has altered human interaction would be confirmed with a recording of a lecture by Sherry Turkle. The audio we incorporated into our video is an excerpt from Sherry Turkle’s lecture named “Humans First—Technology Second.” Sherry Turkle is a Professor of Social Studies of Science and Technology and Director of MIT Initiative on Technology and Self at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this excerpt, Turkle explains the issue that multiple people have approached her saying that they rather communicate with another person over text, email, or Google chat than talk face-to-face. Turkle addresses that young and old alike prefer using technology to communicate instead of personal interaction. Additionally, the importance of conversation to evoke passion, empathy, and teamwork among individuals is highlighted in Turkle’s speech. We thought Turkle’s lecture aligned with the meaning we wanted to convey in our video so we chose an excerpt that would fit well within the time frame of our video footage.

Tools & Methods

To create our video, we used QuickTime Player and Adobe Premiere Pro. Once we decided the clip of a YouTube video that we wanted to use, we screen recorded the video with QuickTime Player. After screen recording videos with QuickTime Player, we uploaded the videos to Adobe Premiere Pro. With Adobe Premiere Pro, we could blur out objects in the videos and compile the videos in the chronological order that we wanted. Additionally, we were able to insert audio footage to play with the video footage. An interesting aspect of the video footage is the beginning and ending clips. The beginning clip introduces the audience to the prevalence of telephones by various actors and cartoon characters answering their phones and provides a comical introduction to our video. The ending clip is a video demonstrating the video feature on the iPhone 6S and this clip suggests that iPhone 6 users could create a film worthy of an Oscar award with their iPhone. This clip comically portrays the infatuation our society has with cell phones.

Here are the communication technologies that we included in our video:

• Printing Press

• Telegraph

• Morse Code

• Typewriter

• Telephone

• Phonograph

• Gramophone

• Automatic Dial Telephone

• Radio

• Television

• Harvard Mark I

• Fax Machine

• (Early) Cellphone

• Apple I

• The IBM PC

• Apple Macintosh 

• iPhone

• iPad