For our group projects, I am currently going through the process of deconstructing and reconstructing the video content that we’ve decided to analyze, coronavirus PSAs. This process requires us to think about one of the questions we posed during our presentation: by what criteria are we deconstructing our media? We want to deconstruct the PSAs in a way that would allow us to dissect and display the values that the PSA producers and New York City residents hold during time. I think that can be done through the audio that accompanies the PSAs. However, one of the PSA finalists barely uses any audio and focuses on using visual video content and typography. For now, I’ve cut up the PSAs based solely on visual content.

Questions like “What is being represented?” and especially “Who is being represented?” guide our video deconstruction process. Thinking about the visual content has allowed us to begin clipping the media according to some visible identities such as age, race, and gender. However, even this process is inherently flawed, since identity traits are obscured or invisible; even gender is not always a visible identity. I watched an interview with the creators of the winning PSA, who explained that they found it important to showcase small business owners. After watching the PSA again with this new context, I think I am able to identify which people are meant to represent the small business owners. However, I am unable to explicitly confirm my assumptions.

This made me think about Rei’s discussion of her group’s inability to speak to the Tangier Island residents for their own project. By not being able to communicate firsthand with the people we are analyzing, we run into potential problems of misunderstanding and misrepresenting them. This is definitely something I will carefully keep in mind as I continue working on my project.