For my digital artefact I decided to follow a recent hobby that I picked up in the last year. Gundam plastic Model kits or Gunplay is a series of model kits designed around the famous Gundam amines throughout the years. My DA focused more on the aspect of customising these kits in order to alter the looks either completely or slightly to enhance them. Many people I have spoken to had never heard of these kits as they are and the media surrounding them are few and far between with a large amount of video content being largely Japanese focused.
I believe my DA has contributed mainly to the R/Gunpla subreddit where I made posts showing off my own kits, tips I had for others when customising their kits and requesting information and tips to do better work myself. As my niche was more focused around the customisation aspect i believe I have assisted some in encouraging how to do it themselves and as posts where others can share their experiences. While my digital artefact assisted others with information regarding customisation I will admit it doesn’t do much in the way of bringing in new audiences to the niche. It is mainly focused on those already into the Gunpla hobby. Now this isn’t to say that it cant bring people in as I know from personal experience that I got into the hobby and niche from seeing a post for a fully painted and customized kit while scanning through the popular tab on Reddit.

Autoethnography described as “the approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyse personal experience in order to understand cultural experience” (Ellis, Carolyn; Adams, Tony E. & Bochner, Arthur P. (2010). Autoethnography: An Overview) Understanding the history and process of autoethnography was an important process for creating this digital artefact. Being a BCM student I have made a few digital artefacts in my day but never have I really had to analyse how the niche I chose for this digital artefact works and how to analyse it through autoethnography. In listening to Genevieve Bell in her talk about “being a human in a digital world” her topic of community really struck me as interesting. She describes how humans naturally want to be part of a community, we want to be in a community of people who share common interests and discuss these interests. Looking at my niche, I found a community all share the common interest in building, customising and showing off their Gunpla, a community where we can talk about feelings and issues people have with kits and sympathise with each other. This helped me understand more when making my posts as I had the knowledge that people engaging with my posts will likely already understand the terminology used and sympathise with certain issues

Ethnography is an understanding that I am new to. In everyday life I am a frequent viewer and consumer of content from YouTube videos about gaming and movies to news content but I had never thought about the content when looking at content in an autoethnographically thought process. As a consumer of content, I just … consumed the content and never gave it a second thought. Now that I understand the concepts used to analyse content from an auto ethnographical perspective, I was able to increase my awareness of the content and enjoy it that much more. Following with the key concepts of Perspective, Problematising, Approaching, Conceptualising , Contextualising, Mapping, Narrowing, Exploring, Including, Comparing, Contrasting, Reflexivity, Sensitivity and Flexibility I was able to asses and analyse the niche I wanted to follow and understand what was already provided by other creators on the platforms I chose and what I could bring to the table. This being a completely new way of thinking came with some challenges in adjusting my way of thinking about the niche and the hobby I have come to love so much.

As mentioned in my blog post for my pitch. I explained that I wanted to create a persona that was friendly, casual and chatty and for the most part I believe I achieved this in my posts and comments made. I never tried to insult anyone and took feedback and tips from comments and used them in my hobby (they were extremely helpful) I will admit I was inconsistent in my posting and didn’t successfully stick to the schedule I outlined in my pitch I still believe I managed to make posts following the main customisations I wanted to try. These main topics being Stickers that come with the kits, Special decals that are more complicated to apply, filling in gaps with a panel liner and of course fixing parts that were broken. As someone who is early in this hobby these are the main tricks to enhance the basic kits that anyone can pickup with little cost. Based on how I have gone with the flow of helpful comments I have received from other people in relation to these tricks i will continue to hone my skills and move on to more complicated techniques while posting about them with my tips.

In relation to the niche I was following it was hard to find platforms to make my posts. As they were not videos I could not use the popular YouTube to post content however if this was pre-covid and before my part time job I would have had more time to format my content into a video format. Reddit was an obvious choice for posting content as people followed subreddits and would come across the content just be scrolling through a page. I attempted to use Instagram which I am deeming a failure as Instagram is very much a platform where you search for specific people to follow and not content as a whole. I should have gone down the twitter pathway with using hashtags however in conversations with friends and family that use Twitter and my own usage, users mainly follow creators and rarely sift through hashtags.
For me Reddit was a major success in relation to getting views on my posts, comments and shares. It was also a major help that Reddit includes its own post insights tracking as I am able to see the amount of people who viewed my posts, the upvote rate and shares people made.

This is an example of one of my posts which resulted in 5.3k people viewing my post. 96% of votes on the post being up votes and a share where someone has forwarded this post elsewhere.

Something thing that really surprised me with my DA was how quickly people responded to my posts. The below image is a comment made by someone within 2 mins of me creating my original post and it was extremely helpful and knowledgeable in relation to the technique I was following at the time

This built my understanding that this subreddit was constantly being viewed by users. Often times I would get a comment shortly after posting and they would continue intermittently throughout the day and even through to late evenings leading me to believe that it is a worldwide viewed subreddit.

One of my more successful posts was relating to one of the most common techniques to enhance one of the Gunpla kits. Panel lining as it is known uses a particular type of ink that flows through seams to add more detail than there usually is. For this post I explained how I did the process and how I swapped to a special marker for larger seams. Comments then flowed in giving extra tips that everyone can view.

For some extra sweet audio content click here

DA link Reddit

DA link Instagram

Being Human in a Digital World – Genevieve Bell (2015) YouTube. YouTube. Available at:

Cooper, R. and Lilyea , B.V. (no date) I’m interested in autoethnography, but how do I do it? – nsuworks. Available at: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5288&context=tqr.

Fqs  View of autoethnography: An overview: Forum qualitative sozialforschung / forum: Qualitative social research, View of Autoethnography: An Overview | Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research. Available at: https://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1589/3095

Ah the final blog, its finally here. I hope ive done these correctly but anyway that’s neither here nor there. I guess lets begin with this one. As mentioned in my pitch I have decided to follow the media niche of customising gunpla. My autoethnographic account on niche is for the last year and a half I have been building these model kits and have wanted to move into customising them however I wanted to take the view point of a beginner giving his tips to other beginners and open up conversations with more experienced people. So far I am collecting data through observing stats on posts such as upvotes, likes and comments posts along with internal data that can be found. For instance Reddit has “post insights” which contains information about how many total views your post has received, upvote rate and the total amount of karma received from a community.

So far I have about 4 posts worth of information with more coming down the line. With my niche I didn’t expect the community to be so active. With 4 out of 5 of my posts I received comments within a few minutes of the posts going live. Also surprised at how many people are unaware of the models I have posted currently. In hindsight it should have hit me before I began posting as Gunpla has existed since the 1980s with hundreds upon hundreds of kits and different grades. Im still working on that and feel ill need to collect more data to begin making sense of my observations. (im a bit behind my schedule. I believe the observations I make will help me in addressing common comments I receive in particular about which particular kit I have. Instead of waiting for someone to ask ill begin stating what it is in my first posts. As added research i have begun researching into the history of the gunplay kits as it has been a hobby for people since the 80s. having a look at some of the kits from the time is is incredible to see how far its come. (see image below – right: model from 2010 – Left Model from the 80s)

Wanna listen to a rambling crazy person? Click here!

(quick side thing, i dont know about anyone else but my wordpress straight didnt work for a few days. Guess its back for me now)

Aaahhhhh its feedback time. Feedback is one of those things I love getting in order to help myself improve however ive always felt ive been hit or miss when giving it to other people. I guess it also depends on the situation as well, for example at my work I am whats considered a senior person in my team who people come to when they need help with a particular task. Fortunately for me there isn’t a whole of ways that the task itself can unfold so it Is quite simple to see what feedback can be given and should be followed. In my experience in BCM courses, the tasks can be so wide with different ways of progressing it feels almost impossible to give feedback. Within the three pitches that looked at to give my comments and feedback on I drew heavily from my own personal tastes. The three pitches I decided to look at were: Alicia Brain and her Moonacres recipe Pitch, Anthony Vorrias and his Old Games Pitch and finally Jackson Thorne and his Dead by Daylight streaming Pitch. All three of these pitches were well put together and informational towards what they wanted to do, how they were gonna do it and where and when they were going to do it.

Alica Brain – Moonacres Recipe Pitch

In my above comment on Alicas Pitch I jump straight into recommending creating some content on TikTok as it has been one of the largest social media platforms in the last few years and has a massive following for food and crafts. I also gave some feedback in regards to the quietness of her speaking in her pitch as feedback I would hope she would fix for her future content if a voice over is to be featured in her videos.

Anthony Vorrias – Old Games Pitch

As a gamer myself I am already interested in what Anthony has lined up content wise for his DA and as a very prolific viewer on YouTube I feel like the feedback I gave him regarding the two types of content would give him something to think about when posting as there can be a bit of an issue with their viewer bases being split by having two pieces of content.

Jackson Thorne – Dead by Daylight Streams

As seen in the above comment the game Jackson Thorne is basing his content around is something I know about but have never played. My feedback for Jackson mainly stems from posting stream highlights on a youtube channel as not everyone can watch streams all the time and having a more solid schedule for posting as it will bring viewers back consistently. I hope my feedback will help these creators with the content they post for their DA and I look forward to seeing how they go.

Wanna listen to some rambllings about my feedback? then click here!

For the last year and a half I have gotten into the hobby of building Gunpla! For those who are unaware gunplay stands for Gundam Plastic Models which in simple terms from that just means robot plastic model kits. These kits have been a great source of entertainment for me especially over the last few years of covid lockdowns. As someone who has always enjoyed building things from my own PCs to Ikea furniture it felt that my world was opened as now I didn’t have to buy useless furniture that wouldn’t fit anywhere in my house or an expensive PC. These kits can be quite simple or extremely complicated and I feel that Im ready for the next step, Customisation.

In my experience there is a plethora of customisation tutorials out there however they all seem to come from people who have been doing this for years which is why I want to form my DA around the idea of a beginner sharing their experiences and failures to other beginners as a what can work and what to avoid situation. In following some online tutorials, I have always found that there are techniques that don’t quite work for me or have issues that weren’t really addressed in those tutorials.

For my persona with my posts, I plan to be informational and friendly while also remaining casual and chatty. For this particular DA I will have to rely on people wanting to see more posts from me and understand the processes I use when customising My Schedule is something I am going to really try to stay up to date however being a part time worker I believe ill be able to manage with this schedule with a post on a Tuesday and Friday as they are the days I don’t work and will have the time to create the content.

My Video Pitch

Guess ill have to re-do it! A lot can happen in a week. New episodes of your favourite show come an go. New movies and games release and another season of the block has started again (I swear it never ends) and you decide to go back on a choice you decided on last week. On a previous post of mine I discussed how I wanted to do a project revolving around creating content based on extra knowledge on peoples favorited video games. In hindsight this wasn’t exactly the best choice given how popular video games are and the amount of content already being released with that idea in mind. In last few years I have discovered a few things that I enjoy outside of playing video games, reading books and building Gunpla!

Now if you want to know what a book is then …uhhh… maybe youll have to go back to school, as for Gunpla ill explain it more in my first post that I will edit in the next few days. As a quick run down it is plastic model kits based on the mech suits from Gundam anime’s.

For my project I want to look at making content based on a beginners look at customising these model kits. From the outside, customising these kits looks to be a large task however in actually looking at the process and understanding what can be done it really depends on how complicated you want to make it.

Now I hope this map is correct. Honestly, I think this is the first one of these I have ever made. Having a look at some information that was provided for what needs to go into the mapping for my particular choice of niche. I feel that with this particular niche I have decided to follow I feel like I can learn a lot about the customisation community, if you have ever seen some of the creative customisations people have done with this model kits you would be amazed as the time and effort people put in. it can also go a long way to share the joys of this particular hobby as it can fit withing a few different categories for example: people who enjoy the source material for where these designs originated from, people who are looking to be creative in a unique way or people like me who originally got into this hobby simply for the aspect of building the kits in the first place.

Wanna listen to this? then click here!

Ah the pesky media niche, sometimes its something you already have an idea of what you want to do. other times and in my case i honestly couldnt say at this point but lucky i can always adjust later on.

My whole life I have always loved playing video games and watching movies however I feel like there isn’t really much of a niche to get into with these two topics given how oversaturated they have become. People all over the world love to play games and watch movies and I cant seem to think of a niche that fits within them. One idea that does come to mind is the idea of extra bits of knowledge that video games and movies don’t normally provide but can be interesting to the right audience. Ill be honest as im sitting here putting this together I can imagine there to be quite a few people out in the world who have content that surrounds giving extra info about games and movies but I feel like its something I could get involved with, maybe like a MythBusters series where I can test theories and questions people have about games or a did you know series. Im gonna think about this a bit more.

Ok having thought more about my niche I have decided I would like to pursue content that revolves around giving peoples extra bits of information about video games they might not know. Whether it be small easter eggs or interesting knowledge about how a particular game was made. I would also plan to provide a weekly video where I test out theories people might have within their game like a Theory Thursday. I would look at mainly posting videos onto YouTube but also branch out and either make specific shorts or cut down videos to fit within the growing shorts content type and post these via YouTube shorts, tik Tok, Facebook reels and Instagram reels. This content would also be suitable for reddit posts within subreddits for the games themselves.

In order to achieve this I will first start to look at interesting titbits for popular games that I own and have easy access to. Luckily I do have every platform games can be found on so there will be no issues with access to games in the future.

If you want to listen to this click here.

(Turns out im really bad at sticking to scripts!)

The future of work is a funny thing. When people are asked about the future of work it could mean different things to each person. Some might say the future of work is how they personally see their future career, what positions they will be in with different companies while others take the this as how jobs will be in the future. Working from home, working conditions and what jobs might be automated. For me its more on the lines of how working in the future will go given our ever-changing world and technology. This couldn’t be more prevalent in the last 2 years with the covid 19 outbreak.

My view on what the future of work means to me leaves me in a weird state of absolutely not knowing what I want to do in the future, I mean I do put some of the blame on my commerce teacher back in year 9 who put it quite bluntly for everyone in the class. Most people don’t know what they want to do and in this day in age most of us will go through 3 or so different careers. And that was coming from a guy who went from working retail, to sales at Telstra to business manager and finally to a teacher where he currently still teaches. This not knowing of what I want to do in the future has led me to make more goals within the jobs and companies which I hold compared to full career aspirations for example, moving from team member to team leader in my retail position. Currently I work at a call centre for a major drinks provider where I am involved in the complaints side customers when they have issues with our poducts, machines and deliveries however im already looking upward to moving into a sales representative position.

There are always two sides to everything, whether it be a coin, choosing a cheesecake or chocolate cake for desert or relationships. Relationships are everything to most people and most definitely something I hold dear with everyone. I know and one of the most important ones to me that I feel like I never full acknowledged until the past year was the relationship I had with my manager. Thinking back on my previous role in retail it had been the best job I have had in all my experience thus far and most of that I have thanks to my manager. The respect I hold for my manager as someone who while technically was above me in title never felt above me in reality. She was there with myself and my other co-workers on the floor cleaning the store, severing customer, and breaking her own back to get as much work as us done before the end of the day. The level of respect I had for my manager and the level of respect she had for her employees was and is still nothing compared to what I have seen today in my managers since. I remember a conversation I had with her once about it and the way she saw it was that her employees would never put in their maximum effort into their work if she had not done the same along side them and I couldn’t agree more. Hearing from Vice chancellor Patricia Davidson really hit home for me in the begging part of the workshop she participated in. as it was explained that she had taken time away from her campus tour to enter a classroom to observe and participate. Hearing this really brought forward my attention and instantly raised my respect for Patricia as it perfectly hits with the main reason why I had enjoyed my previous job so much and I feel like this is rarely seen well at least in my experiences. Patricia went on to state that she loves being with students and as a nurse also loves being with her patients. This all culminates to the importance relationships have in the workplace that help employees in the workforce grow further than they would otherwise. Having now moved on from my position with that manager I have had firsthand experience in a position at a car dealership where manager does the bare minimum required of them for their job while also being in a unique position to witness their manager put in the extra effort to gain that respect and build the relationship with their employees. In this experience my manager had only watched his employees from a distance and only participated in their work when directly related to his however, his boss actively set out to assist the employees in the work that was unrelated to them and actively trained them to do their positions in special sessions once a week. This caring nature and willingness to go above and beyond even made me and my co-workers respect him on a level my own manager couldn’t get to. The experience I had working at a car dealership has allowed me to fully understand the importance of relationships in jobs and the experiences I have gained from my jobs is only further backed up by Patricia and how the simple acts of helping others that are below you or above you can teach people to grow and understand their positions as well as the positions of others in the businesses

Narrative Essay

“You start on Thursday” the 4 words that preceded the excitement of a new full time job. I never though I would be so filled with joy to hear those words again, it was like I was 15 again finding out about my very first casual job. I could barely hold it in as I called both my parents to tell them the great news. I had succeeded in getting a full time job.

Arriving 30 minutes early I sat in my car outside the dealership I would be calling work from then on. My excitement had been in overdrive all night, I was lucky I got any sleep at all. When the time came, I made my way to the entrance, the pure white tyles of the floor perfectly reflected the cars and people walking around. I made my way to reception where I was met by the living embodiment of Janie from ghostbusters. “take a seat, he will be with you soon” I waited patiently in a black leather chair, admiring the building, the cars and the people wondering around. It didn’t take long for me to notice that things were wrong.

Siting in the chair gave me some time to really look around at my new workplace. The tiles where my feet were placed looked roughed, unclean and marked. The black leather chair I sat upon, ripped and stained. The roof moulded in places or missing panels entirely revealing messes of wires. My excitement dimmed a little but in the grand scheme of things it was nothing until I met my boss.

Having waited a good 10 minutes my boss finally came out, I stretched out my hand for a shake and was met by with a spilt moment of hesitation, His shake was weak and unenthusiastic, the disinterest on his face was blinding. Finally, we made our way to his office, on the way I continued to look around noticing the people I would be calling my co-workers. Some smiled as I passed and other didn’t even look. Reaching his office, he handed me 2 printed documents and 5 blank pieces of paper. The printed documents were 2 simple but detailed pages of information for cars sold at the dealership. After some general chatting he showed me to my corner desk and told me to read the documents and take notes. As he walked away, I began exploring my new desk, large and white with a laptop and monitor, 3 drawers and 2 stackable organisers all with someone else’s items inside. What excitement I had for my new job 20 minutes prior had been reduced to the level of excitement you get for a package arriving at your door.

I sat there for most of the day, reading the same 2 documents over and over and over again, taking notes on a blank piece of paper but, I put up with it. In my head I was getting paid to sit there and read the same documents and take the same notes over and over again. I got a little bit of a reprieve when a co-worker from a different aspect of the business took pity on me and decided to show me a little bit of the ropes. They were ropes that didn’t exactly apply to me, but it was the only interaction I was going to get from someone else that day. It continued like this for 3 days.

For 3 days I sat at my desk with the same 2 printed documents from my boss, writing notes. The only difference was I decided to bring in a notebook. By this time, I felt tired and defeated. Outside of the occasional chat with a co-worker while getting coffee or if someone needed me to be their errand boy to get the papers from the printer 10 meters away. Within 3 days I already dreaded going to work in the morning. Doing the same menial task assigned to me on my first day. At this stage the only interactions I had had with my boss was the handing over of the initial documents and the occasional “find this car downstairs”. I was fed up.

Initially I had thoughts of just leaving job, calling it quits, but no one wants to do that. No one wants to be labelled as a quitter. It was day 4 when my excitement for work rose again. I was gonna stick it to him by being proactive with what I had on hand. If he wasn’t going to spend the time training me or assigning someone to training me, I was going to do it myself.

Are trigger warnings a necessary form of communication for an audience.

As a small possible research question for my proposal I mainly would like to find out if trigger warnings for media content are useful and from there can decide if they are necessary. From my current basic understanding I cant say how effective they are as personally I tend to ignore them or pay very little attention however, I can see the potential benefits and how they could be necessary and effective. In the long run I don’t see why they cant be on media content by default anyway, I may ignore them however, I don’t dislike them for being there.

with the amount of media content being produced on a daily basis it can be hard to focus on the content you wish to see or filtering new content you would like to try and see. This combined with the vast variety of different content each individual enjoys it can be hard to sort out the content that you personally enjoy and content that might trigger you. Warnings have been apart of human culture for centuries from the simple electric fence sign to your mother warning you not to sit to close to the TV or your eyes will turn square. As time has gone on, content online has evolved and started to tackle more and more sensitive topics. Recent examples I can think of include the highly controversial Netflix series 13 Reasons why, which tackled themes of bullying and suicide.

In recent years issues that come from mental health have been an ever growing issue among people especially with access to different online content. The need for warnings has never been higher, not just for people who do get triggered by certain content but for the public relations a company or person who produces content has with their audience. The previously mentioned 13 reasons why got caught up with some trouble when they not only failed to provide a warning at the beginning of episodes but also showing certain content that that had been previously stated by a number of mental health institutions should not been shown as it could glorify and encourage some to copy. This disregard for a simple trigger warning for such serious content caused many viewers to negatively rate the show, with some mental health organisations criticizing the producers resulting in warnings being added.

In a report titled Trigger warning: Empirical evidence ahead, Benjamin W.Bellet, Payton J.Jones, Richard J.McNally conducted some research into the effectiveness of trigger warnings before particularly distressing written and audio visual pieces of content. The results of their findings found that people who identified as those who would triggered found themselves to have a greater anxiety while reading or watching the media content. From this report we can see that trigger warnings may actually have the opposite effect than intended. In another report titled Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals With Trauma Histories. Researchers also found that trigger warnings often didn’t function as intended and often caused more harm when shown to people with traumatic histories. Finally, in a 2019 paper titled Trigger Warnings Are Trivially Helpful at Reducing Negative Affect, Intrusive Thoughts, and Avoidance found that trigger warnings held no meaningful effects leaving participants with neither help nor overly negative effects from the ensuing content.

Looking through some reports has been a little bit of an eye opener for me as I previously thought that trigger warnings often helped people suffering from traumatic experiences. This is something I would like to do further research on for my research proposal.

References

SAGE Journals. 2020. Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals With Trauma Histories – Payton J. Jones, Benjamin W. Bellet, Richard J. McNally, 2020. Available at: <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2167702620921341&gt; [Accessed 24 March 2021].

Sanson, M., Strange, D. and Garry, M., 2019. Trigger Warnings Are Trivially Helpful at Reducing Negative Affect, Intrusive Thoughts, and Avoidance – Mevagh Sanson, Deryn Strange, Maryanne Garry, 2019. SAGE Journals. Available at: <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2167702619827018&gt; [Accessed 24 March 2021].

W.Bellet, B., J.Jones, P. and J.McNally, R., 2021. Trigger warning: Empirical evidence ahead+. Science Direct. Available at: <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0005791618301137&gt; [Accessed 24 March 2021].