Examining “Adapting to the Times”

Article link: http://newsworx.org/s20/findingshelter/adapting.html

Adapting to the Times is a multimedia post about the lives of three different students and how they are living in quarantine from the COVID-19 virus. I chose to examine this piece because of its relevance to my own life as a university student in California and its candid take on our new reality. The package included three video biographies, two pie charts, and one photo. Its simplistic but concrete in how it delivers its content. The importance of its structure is that it can clearly evoke information to a future historian or citizen researcher who wants to relive or learn about the lives of the people who lived through the pandemic. Although the videos are mediums of flexible and human information, the graphs provided on media usage and family/neighbor interaction provide the evidence that life did indeed change during the pandemic.

What the multimedia package lacks is in the quality of the videos. I am not clear if it's a reasonable expectation to have each audio match in audio quality. For example, the first video set the standard for both audio and video quality. Perhaps, it is because Alex Drew, the first presenter, wanted to do a standard biography. Nia Coats and Anne Lima presented in fundamentally different ways. Coats took on more of a storyteller role and Lima perhaps wanted to focus more on the ambiance of the pandemic world. Perhaps some clarification in their different videos would have helped, especially in Anne Lima’s vlog.

The multimedia package, in general, has many components. In the section I observed, “Finding Shelter”, there was an appropriate mixture of different mediums and in its entirety did not result in my lack of interest. It was a nice appetizer to what would likely be a bulk of content surrounding the quarantining season of California. Perhaps what could be improved would be a little more context to what each life was like beforehand.