Video Documentary Project: The Telephone
My video documentary topic was the telephone, a technology that has maintained its relevance from the late 19th century to today, despite vast remediation. I chose to analyze the telephone in the style of a series of narrated images, both old and new. I also incorporated some fitting telephone sounds that could accompany my title slides throughout the presentation. Multimedia inclusion would help to emphasize my research on the telephone’s historical and cultural background, how the technology helped to shape human history, communication, education, as well as the change in documentation of reading and writing in the beginning of a shift to secondary orality (Ong, 1982).
I initially struggled with finding sources for this project; sources that seemed to be the most useful were only available in print and I do not live close to a university library for which I am eligible for membership. I was forced to dig to find free copies of e-books and to go to local bookstores to peruse copies of these titles. Additionally, I dug deeper into the databases available through the UBC library and found some interesting journal articles about the telephone from perspectives that I didn’t expect, such as Victorian literature, archivism, and journalism. There are several print sources which I am sure I would have included had I been able to access them.
My successes came when I began to tie all of my sources together to weave narratives around the impact of the telephone and our societal shift to a secondary oral culture, the decrease in written documentation of human conversations, and the subsequent affordances that the telephone could provide, specifically in the domains of reading, writing, and human communications. Once I focused on these points, it became easier to visualize what kinds of images could be paired with these words, and the storyboard for the video really began to flow. Later in the process, it appeared that I had too much information and I had to cut a component of the script that overviewed gender differences in telephone use – an interesting notion, though not heavily related to reading and writing or human communications.
I hope you enjoy the documentary; there were many aspects of the script I had to trim to keep within the 10:00 (+/- 15%) timeframe. The final product before credits is 11:18! Phew.
Script & References File: ETEC 540 – Video Documentary, Script & References (Olson)
Here is the link to the YouTube Video if the embedded video below fails to work in your browser.
Amazing work, Victoria, and by posting first (I think), you give the rest of us something to strive toward. For the one line about the ubiquity in Western culture, though, I think the cell phone is even more ubiquitous in Eastern culture. When I taught ESL in the mid-aughts, most of my students had more than one phone (one for work, another for family, another for friends), and would call Toronto ‘backwards’ because you can’t use your phone on the subway (to which I would retort, “but we can drink tap water!”).
Thank you for your warm words, Randy! The research that I followed only discussed western culture, so I thought it apt to include the word, but I certainly agree that mobile ubiquity reaches far beyond the western world.