So far, you have done copy for something very familiar (you About Page) and an advocacy, which focuses on your specific stand on an issue, and selling that stand to a bigger audience.
The first copywriting project was about deep-diving into your own aesthetic, beliefs, and goals, with a keen sense of who you are talking to for a website. The second copywriting project was about taking on an issue or a cause, and working towards building copy and design for a poster that would target a specific audience that is deeply entrenched in the landscape of disinformation.
This last project is an individual or pair project. It gives you the freedom to decide on copy for (1) a problem that you will identify based on research, and (2) a multimedia solution to that problem that is not limited to simply creating a website or app for information dissemination. There will be bonus points for doing a digital poster with your copy and design for the project itself.
As a process, we are going through four steps. First, reading the research. Second and third go together: finding a problem and a multimedia solution, which is where idea generation happens. And fourth, copywriting that idea.
Your multimedia solution will not be executed. BUT you will need to describe how execution is possible.
Read The Research
You are all working from two different research projects. The first one is: “Architects of Networked Disinformation” by Jonathan Ong and Jason Cabañes, and the second one is: “Tracking Digital Disinformation in the 2019 Midterm Elections,” a 2020 study on fake news and disinformation by Jonathan Ong, Nicole Curato, and Ross Tapsell.
How are you supposed to read this research towards finding a problem that might have a multimedia solution?
First, we start by knowing that disinformation is a multimedia problem to start with. Right now we know this to be true because we live in a time and place where multimedia is used to spread disinformation. Technically, this is a multimedia problem. This means that there has to be a multimedia solution to it as well.
BUT also these studies detail how multimedia platforms are actually just tools in this industry. What actually makes disinformation move is a strategic process that includes people who are paid to make things happen. While that might not be a multimedia problem, your challenge here is to look at a specific point in either of these two studies that you’d like to address, and come up with a multimedia way to address it.
Second, Reading is always always about learning to ask questions. If you look at the way you were able to do revisions on Projects 1 and 2, you were actually being asked questions as you went along.
The same thing applies here. You need to be asking questions about the information this research offers you, and these questions always end with: what is the multimedia solution to this?
Reminders
Here are two important points from the 2019 study that are important to consider for this final project.
“Our research does not attempt to correlate social media strategies with electoral success. Rather, we examine the consequences social media campaigns have for shaping public conversations, debates, and deliberations that precede elections. While we argue that social media alone cannot swing a whole election, their effects are profound: they can bait and divert public attention, normalise public incivilities, and mobilise communities through hyper-emotional and partisan communication that makes listening across difference impossible.”
This is important: we need to be on the same page about the consequences of disinformation. We need to agree that it is affecting all of our lives, within and beyond the electoral process. So while this study focuses on how it was used as space by the electoral, we want to see the bigger picture and find a problem that we can solve beyond elections, because it is a problem that exists in our everyday lives, elections or no elections, given the powers that it serves.
“We argue that the common failure of fact checks or investigative reports of ‘troll accounts’ is that they often neglect tracing the connection between a singular instance of ‘fake news’ to a broader project of undermining values in society, whether it is the legacies of liberal democracy or emerging power of China.”
Most of you will quickly and easily fall back on concepts of “fact checking.” But as we established in our class, even that exercise is very much discredited at this point, and so it is important that you don’t fall back on the easy responses that many others are already doing. The idea that fake news and disinformation actually also deliberately target our value system is critical here—when they sell the idea that politicians stealing from us is okay, what kind of values are they actually undoing? When they jail someone like Senator De Lima, what they are actually doing is undermining human rights as a concept. Those bigger pictures are important so that we do not simply fall back on easy solutions that do not necessarily work in our favor.
The goal is simple, as with your two previous projects: find a problem, focus on its target audience, arrive at a multimedia solution to the problem. Create copy: A name and slogan for the project, and About Text. ***
