Digital Media Cultures, Assignment 2

In semester 2 we have a new assignment for Digital Media Cultures. 

Over the past few weeks, we've been having lectures about dissertations and how to write them. I have found this really helpful because the idea of a dissertation seemed extremely daunting but after having it explained to us as it being more like 4 normal sized essays, it definitely seems more manageable. Fortunately I've got quite a good idea of what I want to do my dissertation on. As it is such an important and long piece of work, I need to ensure that it will be a topic that will keep me interested for months on end. Because of this I really want to do my dissertation on reality TV. I am not too sure on what angle I am going to take yet but I would love to delve into all of the different types and talk about everything, with a few case studies thrown in for good measure! These lectures have made me really think about third year and the importance of starting early so I plan to start my research throughout the summer along with as much work experience as I could possibly get!

This semester's assignment was, in groups of 4, produce a 2000 word report of a dissertation proposal: 1000 word literature review and 1000 dissertation synopsis. We were put into groups according to what we wanted to our dissertation on and I chose reality TV/television formats. Our group of 4 (Sophie, Hayley and Ceri) were then split into groups of 2 and between us, 2 of us had to do the literature review and the other 2 had to do the synopsis. As Ceri, who was my partner, wanted to do the dissertation synopsis, I was more than keen to also do it. I thought that this was a good idea because it would be like doing a mini practice dissertation and as the saying goes, practice makes perfect! 

I found researching the topic of television formats enlightening because I didn't realise just how much of a valuable commodity a successful format like Big Brother is and how a good format idea can go global. I am definitely interested in researching this in more detail because I found it interesting learning about how the television industry.

The process of putting our dissertation together went smoothly as we sat down for a day and managed to collate our research and produce a synopsis which I am very proud of. It showed me that with plenty of research and planning,  a dissertation becomes a much more doable challenge.