Reflection

Reflection

            Our research question was “how did television broadcasts during the Cold War shape the American public’s perspective and spread anti-communist ideals?”. We chose this question because we wanted to understand the behavior of the television network space when it was young. Today, the television network industry is one that continues to grow and it differed greatly from what it used to be in the 1950s. As researchers, we wanted to understand the reason for these differences. After doing some initial research on propaganda, we felt that looking at propaganda of posters or early radio would not be interesting to research. We felt that researching a more multimodal form of technology that exploded in the market would be more insightful. Considering how television is still a major part of the lives of Americans today more than most other writing technologies, studying the history of television would help us understand why is it the way it is today.

            Our group’s purpose in writing this paper was to understand the history of television in the context of the Cold War. Another purpose of writing this paper was to practice and apply important skills that will be useful in years to come when we are working in industry. As an engineer, scientific papers are important for communicating ideas obtained from conducted experiments or doing extensive research on a topic. In past literary essays written, the content of the essays relied more on the analysis of the fictional text and will probably not be used in the workplace. However, as Georgia Tech students, it is just as important to gain as much exposure researching non-fiction topic. Starting to write academic research papers now will benefit us in the long term.

            As a group, we set up meetings and assigned portions of each section to every group member. Working with 5 other people was a good experience as it forced us to address the needs of every member. Most of the writing would be done outside of meetings as if we spent time writing the paper together in meetings, it would take much longer. Instead, meetings were dedicated to compiling the contributions of all of the group members and discussing changes and edits to be made to each other. As a group, we were able to establish trust by giving positive constructive criticism to each other and improving each other’s writing. When one person would make an edit that changed the meaning of the sentence, we would make sure that the change was unanimous. In addition, towards the end of the process we realized that we had written too much in the evaluation section. Together, we discussed and decided to cut a  long paragraph that two of us worked on. We were able to convince ourselves that the paragraph was not relevant to the argument of television as a whole, and nobody’s feelings were hurt. Overall, we got along pretty well and there were no disputes or issues about a group member not doing his share of work assigned to him.