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Michael Nguyen’s Audio Project
Audio Book Face:
For this audio piece I will create a three-minute voice recording of myself. The recording will be of a discussion between a teenager and his mind. I plan to have the conversation run at a slow pace consisting of many echoes, repetitions, and run over sentences. By using these three performance devices I attempt to portray the many conflicts between an individual and his conscience, with a comedic twist. I have managed to distort the tone of my voice to easily distinguish the voices of character and the voice of his conscience. I chose this topic simply because social networking has become more than a part of our everyday lives. It has become who we are, we live it, and we breathe it, thus my title for the piece: Book Face. I decided on using this medium specifically because it was the best way I find to convey my message that social networking has become an addiction or a disease – namely Facebook. With the exception of one of the background sounds, (which is a loop I found on Garageband) I recorded and edited the remaining audio entirely by myself.
In my final product I can only hope that my message will be clearly understood. It is a simple concept that many teenagers can relate too. Almost every teen has a Facebook account, if not, I suppose they are still in the Myspace era, or using another form of social network and/or account. My goal is to give the audience a sense of anxiousness, and through the use of my reading devices, I believe that I can achieve that. The strong and distinct voices will have the ability to keep the audience drawn in. My piece does not include many sound effects, for I focused only on the characters voices and the dialogue between them. The many pauses and breaks between their conversation will allow the argument to have a greater sense of realism, in which I am hoping will better my chances of the audience relating to my message. My piece begins as just an informal fight between a teen and his conscience. The conscience is arguing of major problem found in the individual, who, is in complete denial. As my project progresses the character does give in and accept his faults and admit to his addiction. However, it is not until near the end of my piece that the audience will find out that this apparent addiction of the character is only of Facebook. Not a drug or an alcohol problem essentially, but something just as powerful and trapping.
While searching the web for both good and bad sites I stumbled upon numerous pages that in my opinion work, but just as many that I dislike and I feel that do not work.
An example of a good site
Immediately I was unhappy with this particular page. The initial start up gave at least different 3 options that included a requirement that a viewer needs to install just to explore the webpage. In my opinion if the page does not open or load by itself and requires people to download or install various software just to get it working then I am already finding myself impatient. I was even more frustrated that the site’s navigation was not entirely logical. Some links had more images than the others, however the site kept a ‘plus’ sign beside their images as if there were more, despite the plain and obvious fact that there were not. I can give the creator kudos for keeping their layout consistent, but to me it did not seem to make sense. The overall layout is quite flat, and the colour scheme is kept a little too simple. I find that this site is, lacking something that I believe people refer to as the ‘umph’ factor.
A second site that I found to be horribly distasteful
Forget the first webpage because artists who only want to share their love for design created it. This new site is in fact is one of Yale University’s pages. So despite the fact that the university is a school for art, the designers of the page failed to even consider the basic elements and principles of design: mainly dealing with emphasis, colour, balance and unity. The texts were extremely hard to stay focused on because of the repeating background image which also had text was too much of a distraction and interference. The colours chosen had no sense of unity or harmony. The contrast of colours between each table did not work whatsoever. The composition of the page in its entirety had no sense of visual balance therefore making the layout all too busy. At this moment in time I would not be surprised to find any broken links or technical malfunctions. I am much too distracted with the terrible look.
Finally, a site worth more than one visit.
Not only is this website visually appealing, it is simple and effective. I believe in all aspects of design the creators of the adobe website managed to produce and maintain a clean web page, with an easy to find navigation system, a brilliant colour scheme and had a good balance between content and graphics. Although Adobe has many resources to make their page extremely flashy and fancy, they kept their theme subtle and straightforward. It is because of the the simplicity and user friendly-ness of the site that makes me love it so much.
To be quite honest, I am not sure why my name has not appeared on Google. Not only as the first hit, but the first 5 pages entirely. The steps I had taken in expanding my digital identity are very much like my peers in class. I had created accounts for Facebook, Youtube, Flickr, Vimeo and all other required networks. In doing so, I also uploaded various content onto each account and posted tags that included my name, the new media program and Ryerson University. I also created Meta Keys to increase the chances of my name moving up on Google’s search index. I had ultimately hoped that my posts and tags would guide those viewing my content to all of my other pages and of course my WordPress blog. Unfortunately none of the steps I have taken have been successful. Perhaps more time is required for all of my content to become recognized on the web. As my on going attempt to expand my digital identity continues, I will try my best to consistently upload more content and to become a highly active member on each network that I have just recently joined.
I am not the slightest bit of surprised to find so many results when ‘Googl-ing’ my name, and even more so when realizing that none of the outcomes had anything to do with me. Apparently the name Michael Nguyen seems to be very popular. I am simply just another individual who has the honour of sharing such a name. Through the search, I found links to facebook members, other digital media artist web pages and various blog sites, however none of which were pertaining to me. Some contributing factors to why I am so hidden are most likely due to my highly set privacy settings on all of my social network accounts, and the fact that I tend to come up with different usernames on every new account that I create, just to prevent any unusual online experiences or encounters.
To be quite honest, I am not entirely sure if there were something that I would try to hide from an employer or a teacher in regards to my Digital Footprint. The sole purpose of having a digital footprint in itself is to be found or recognized is it not? In discovering that there is so little to come across with my online identity I would not be able to declare what should or should not be seen by employers or teachers. However I believe the difficulty to find me is just as bad as hiding my digital identity to begin with. A possible solution to my problem is to create accounts with less privacy settings activated, similar usernames and for me to submit posts with the same tags.
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