Reflection on Unit 4 Media Matters

At the end of the unit, we were given an assignment to create a media campaign. Our group decided to create an organization called “China Blue Sky” which was aimed to increase people’s awareness of the air pollution in China.

This activity can be connected to what I knew already. I have learned some skills of persuading people in Language Arts class before, such as the use of imperative verbs and exaggerated adjectives. I have been using them in my project, and I saw how effective they were. It also connected to my learning in other subjects. We were looking at the elements and techniques of propaganda during the Cold War in the last unit of Humanities. I found that modern media campaigns are quite similar to those propaganda. The techniques used to create a propaganda poster, such as simplicity and imagery can also be used in a modern commercial advertisement.

It also extended my knowledge. Not until we actually ran a media campaign, did I realize how powerful a media campaign can be. It can influence people’s minds very effectively and quickly. After learning this unit, I just noticed how close medias are to me. Hundreds of types of medias are actually shown up everywhere at anytime around me, and we, all of us, are influenced by them 24 hours a day. I found this quite shocking, because the truth is that a great number of people did not even know that they are in fact strongly influenced by the advertisements around them every single day.

In my opinion, the most challenging thing in this project is to cooperate effectively with the other members in my group. It is all about communicating. It could be a pretty difficult thing to explain your idea and your plan of making something to others in the group, simply because people’s point of views are completely different. Especially when we were trying to make some links between my works and others’, there would always be some disagreements. However, it was quite fun and exciting when we finally figured out the best way of linking and presenting our works (My Website). I really enjoyed this assessment.