Impact of Technology

Technology has advanced so much in the recent years, we now use all kinds of technology for communication, education, banking, shopping, transportation and surfing the web. The main bits of technology people use daily are tablets, laptops/computers and smart phones because you can do so much on these devices. Apple's iPhone seems to be the most popular phone alongside Apple's iPad as the most popular tablet,  this could be due to the easy to use operating systems and Apple's but it is most likely due to Apple's iTunes which allows users to buy music, books, movies, apps and magazines from different stores on the devices. The 'Newsstand' app is a very popular app and can be used to subscribe to newspapers and magazines to be read and accessed on the Apple devices meaning that the media can be read digitally anywhere and is fast and cheap. Because of the development of technology the media distribution companies of newspapers and magazines now release digital copies of their products to reach the widest audience possible. As Peter Fraser said 'A broader version of conventional literacy, which enables, all visual, aural and digital forms, seeking to enable people to become thoughtful producers and interpreters of media' this means that more people are able to produce and interpret media due to the technological advances. 

I used many different pieces of technology to produce my magazine's Cover, Contents page and Double Feature Article. 

First I learned how to use the website blogger, I had to create an account and create a blog then learn how to create the posts that included text, images and moving images, for each part of my planning, practical and evaluation. I used the blog as an online portfolio and liked the fact that all my coursework became blog entries published online because it meant I had become not just a consumer but a producer of media texts which fits in with the theory of Gauntlett as he argued in 2007 that the internet has made this possible through breaking down the boundaries and allowing anyone to become a producer of a media text.

I also learned how to use Survey Monkey to create surveys and ask people questionnaires online easily. Survey Monkey was good because it allowed me to get all the results with ease, and on graphs already for me. It also had pre-set questions that were similar to the ones I was asking so it worked well for me. I learnt to create surveys and share them online through Facebook for anyone to complete.

I learned how to use Canon DSLR cameras during the course of making my magazine pages; I already had experience with Nikon DSLRs but not Canon so I had to learn where the buttons were positioned and what they all did because they were in different locations to the Nikon ones. I also learned how to use a Portrait lens, this is a lens that is at one focal length, with this lens you can control the focus and the aperture with ease, this allows optimum control to get the photo you want exactly. The only problem I had with this lens is that because my studio lighting was quite bright, I had to focus the photo, then put the aperture right down otherwise the photo would be too bright and look overexposed. I also learned how to use these cameras to film moving image for this evaluation.

Photoshop was the main software I used during the construction of my pages and I found this challenging at first as I hadn’t really used Photoshop a lot before starting the prelim task. Getting to do the preliminary task before starting the main music magazine work helped because it allowed me to learn the basics in terms of creating new documents that were the right size, creating and naming layers and what some of the basic tools did, like the; move, text, paint bucket, eraser and marquee tools. However, my skills were not advanced enough at this point and I had to learn a lot more for my main task. I looked at YouTube tutorials to learn quick tips and tricks, which made the process of constructing the pages faster and look more effective. During the main task I learned how to use different tools and options for effects. Tools I became more familiar with were the lasso, crop, magic wand, gradient tools and the image adjustment settings that could be altered.

I learned the basics of Illustrator for creating more interesting typography styles and graphics and learned how to use InDesign for created page layouts that looked more professional than my early preliminary task work that I did just in Photoshop. I found InDesign particularly useful when designing my double page spread as there was a lot of text on this page that needed to be aligned professionally.