Link to Podcast + Reflection

Reflection for Podcast

               Working on this podcast ended up being an interesting project that primary challenged the way I presented my argument. In my podcast I was a Gamemaster who was speaking from the present about the implications of a seemingly unethical decision he made regarding giving a contestant on a high prize money game show an unfair advantage. I attempt to explain the rationale behind that decision in the end as a reflection of the event as a past memory and also incorporated what the Gamemaster was thinking in the time of the actual moment when the character Sanjit was the contestant answering the million dollar question. Through Sanjit’s dialogue and introduction, he is established as a character who comes from rough beginnings and has lived an extremely adverse life financially. I subtlety wrote in the dialogue that he spent his childhood in an orphanage to imply how little family he had to raise him while growing up. I included such context details to emotionally and logically appeal to the audience to persuade them to agree with the Gamemaster’s decision making as forms of ethos and pathos. Especially with regards to pathos, this audio project overall brings to life an interesting scenario with sound that is entertaining to listen to that if were presented in just a written form would be more boring or harder to understand.

               The main purpose of this project is to portray a controversial ethical dilemma and the decision making process behind a specific individual to educate the audience on how to determine the most ethical course of action. Using my voice was crucial in the project as I alternated between the anecdote of the actual Game Show and my character narrating and giving context in the present. This strategy is very similar to what was discussed in the Shipka reading as using an “imaginary” or auditory space as a means of conveying an argument is can be as equally or more strong than simply writing a paper. Specifically, in the reading, Val used museum and audio narration to creatively portray her project on American Greed. This principle was applied in my project by using a voice deepening effect for the narrating voice of the Gamemaster in the present helped distinguish clearly which one was which and more importantly to make the project overall more intriguing to listen to.

               Additionally the Shipka reading discusses how the 2 examples of the individuals who pursued some sort of audio project could help prompt future areas of exploration. Both students imagined ways in which their texts could be made much richer and complex and were pushed to think beyond the “repertoire of choices one finally commits to when a text is due”. This motivates them to think innovatively and even improvements upon their own audio project and wider applications are possible. In the context of my podcast project, essays and texts concerning arguments relevant to the study of ethics can be animated in multimodal compositions which may further improve the reception and perception of the argument. It goes to show that creating multimodal platforms to educate and argue has so much more potential and freedom in delivering the point than simply written essays.