Adam King Week 9

One of the things that struck me the most deeply with the three websites we viewed this week is how my relationship with a piece of media is altered by how valid my first impression is. While in some situations the power of the content is enough to outweigh a bad presentation of it, there’s no doubting that you can lose or gain interest from an audience by nothing more than that first impression you present to them.

My first impression of Games for Change was “Sweet, combing education with procrastination – my two favorite things!” But after attempting to play a good number of the games listed, I realized they all either required me to download a new program onto my computer or they were only playable on Smart Phones – a technology I do not personally own. So not only was I disappointed that I couldn’t access the majority of their site, I became somewhat spiteful of the whole site for not thinking of folks like me as part of their target audience. While I’m sure this was not their intent, it gave me an unsettling impression – like I was considered a valuable part of their equation.

Still Water had somewhat of a direct opposite effect on me. Their site design is horrendous – at first glance I thought it was a power point presentation from 1993 on CPR practices. While arguably this would potentially turn a good portion of the audience away, I’m a sucker for kitch and thus was intrigued to see what topic such inept users of technology were trying to present to me. Does this mean that I think it’s better to set people’s hopes low? No, but it does seem like a better alternative than having their hopes set too high.

Now Media Storm is a site that many of us have looked at a variety of times this semester, so there was a degree of familiarity here. As Amanda pointed out, I was somewhat surprised when I realized they were a production company first and foremost, and a institute for social change as a secondary, but that’s only because this was the first time I had viewed their homepage. While she was somewhat disappointed after her views of the organization’s moral practices were squashed, it seems to me that there is nothing misleading about the way they present themselves. With no back-story, your first impression is that they are talented practitioners of media crafting and that they have a degree of focus on relevant social issues. In other words, they present a solid initial image, and then that image is only exemplified by the moral social dedicated work interspersed in their creations. In my opinion, their site succeeds by being even more than the initial level of quality that we’re introduced to.

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