To Team or Not To Team

 

For my final media studies project, I have been given the opportunity to work as a group or alone. Working in a group allows you to open your horizons and collaborate with others; you may even possibly find new ideas that you never had before. While this may seem great, there is also a lot to gain from working alone. You won’t have to agree with others on what you want to do, you have complete creative freedom, and there isn’t a risk of being left to do all of the difficult work alone. 

 

First of all, you won't have to agree with others on what to do. When I did my Lost At Sea assignment, a few of the people in my group had differing ideas that I didn’t agree with at all, and I found that to make peace in the group I ended up agreeing with them and ultimately getting answers wrong that I had right before. This made me personally feel that working alone I would be able to work better than with a group. The article Collective action: Collaboration, rebellion, creative dialogue: Surrealism as ideological defiance agrees with me as well as they state “To determine if single songwriters or teams of songwriters produced more number one Billboard songs, we found that 29 (52.73%) of the top Billboard hits between 1955 and 2009 were written by individuals and 26 (47.27%) were written by groups.”. This information statistically proves that people are more likely to work better alone than in a group with others.

 

Another point is that when working alone I will have the ability to create whatever I want however I want to. The whole point of working in a team is collaborating with others and hearing their ideas, but what about the times where you simply just want to use your own ideas? According to Of Rabbit Holes and Aquamarines "I see, for myself, three distinct phases of the project: Phase (1), the conception, the dream, and the planning; Phase 2, the event itself, the realization, the doing, Phase 3 (the one we are in currently), the describing of that doing, the distilling, and the telling, in order to disseminate our experience to others.” This quote helped show me what it takes to truly feel a connection with the material you create; something that makes creatin work enjoyable is having it be personal. When working in a group, I will not be able to have the ability of personal writing such as this which in the long run is a massive loss for readers since writing that isn’t personal and purposeful can often times come out bland.

 

 

Finally, working in a group allows for there to be a chance that you end up doing the most difficult work. According to Collective action: Collaboration, rebellion, creative dialogue: Surrealism as ideological defiance. “Social loafing is the likelihood of individuals contributing less when working on a task as part of a group than when working on a task alone”. This quote made me realize that it is possible that I will be left to do the most difficult or unwanted work in the group while other members decide to slack off. Personally, in a group setting, I am a person who decides to take charge and get things done rather than wait for others to take charge. If I chose someone to be in my group who wasn’t capable of doing their work correctly and accordingly, I would be hurting my own grade in the long run. From the experience I had I am able to tell it is a lot harder to judge peoples’ work ethic based on the outward persona they emit. For instance, when looking at someone’s Instagram account I was only able to tell what that person wanted me to know about them and not all the qualities they actually possess.

 

My mind has been made and I have decided to work on this project alone. I decided this for a few reasons including having creative freedom, not having to compromise with others on things you don’t want to and nullifying the risk of having to do difficult work without help from other team members. While I am loosing the ability to hear other perspectives and gain new ideas from peers, I am gaining the ability to have the whole project be entirely about what I want to create which is a worthy trade to me.