Pensive: Post Workshop Musings

TV or Radio. Two of the most prominent broadcast media outlets. Yet which does one choose when trying to produce a story?

With radio, one can very easily enter the private world of a listener and delve quite deeply into a topic whilst in their head space. With this comes a wealth of opportunities. Being impoverished of vision, the listener must glean from what is broadcast in order to gain a broader context of the story they are being told and create mental images to accompany.

With TV, one is afforded the benefits of visual representation, yet it is much more difficult to keep an audience engaged when it is very easy to be a passive viewer of what is presented. Certainly, the ability to represent place, time etc. through visual stimulus is a huge benefit of TV, yet I would argue that in a world of information overload it is much more difficult to capture an audiences attention on TV than it is on Radio.

To a certain extent, this idea is seconded by Ricketson, M in his piece Writing Feature Stories, on which I will remark very soon.

So it is up to the artist to consider both these mediums and choose one that best manipulates the viewers attention. For example, a story of paintings by Vincent Van Gogh would be best represented through TV as viewers are able to see the works in front of them, whereas a broader study of anxiety and its effects on its sufferers, including Van Gogh, could be better represented through the medium of Radio.