Yes! Yay! A post where I talk all about myself and what I love!

I have an incontrollable love for the medium of radio. I love sound, and music, and the freedom that radio gives producers to explore these tools to create meaningful and inspiring audio pieces (unless you’re listening to commercial radio in which case nothing is meaningful and everything is crap).

I’ve known since primary school that I wanted to work in the media industries; until about year 10 I had my heart set on a career in journalism. As I slowly learnt more about the broad media landscape I began to see a lot of potential for creativity and freedom in radio production, and since this realisation I’ve never looked back. In year 10 I completed a week of work experience at the Australian Radio Network in Richmond which just completely solidified my career aspirations to work in the industry.

I spend a lot of time volunteering at SYN, working on a variety of shows ranging from newsreading, to a late night show about sex and relationships, to a show I produced and presented all by myself about the current happenings in popular media. Many friends, family and peers struggle to understand why I would spend countless hours contributing to these shows unpaid, but to me it’s just like playing your favourite sport or playing in a band. It’s my passion.

For the moment I have no particular aspirations or predictions for my professional future, rather I seek to continue to place all my focus and energy on gaining invaluable experience in community radio in order to (hopefully) prepare me for a happy career.

My tutor for Network Media mentioned a book named Understanding Media in class last week. She spoke briefly about his famous concept about how ‘the medium is the message’. Fascinating idea! I’ve heard this idea before, I think in high school. I see a lot of reason in it, it’s very honest and real. So I did some research on the author, Marshall McLuhan, and I’ve now got my heart set on reading this book.

So whilst I’m pretending that this post is a demonstration of my engagement with this course and an interest in learning more about media, honestly this is just a little note to myself to remember to read the book.

Prior to the establishment of this educational and university study based blog surrounding my media degree, my concept of blogs didn’t extend much beyond Tumblr. Or maybe even WordPress at a push.

Similarly I thought blogs were just a way for young people to talk about things they like and hope that they become famous for it, i.e. the countless famous fashion and/or beauty bloggers who now make a living solely from their blogs.

I’d never considered that a blog would effectively be used for an educational purpose. I remember in high school my media teacher tried to use a class-run blog to create an online platform for our learning and I laughed at him. I thought it was ridiculous. Blogs were for people to talk about their lives/interests/experiences/etc. Not for education.

Here I am a year later writing about my growing understanding of this concept… On my education based blog… And I’m enjoying it! Who would’ve thought?! Definitely not my high school media teacher that’s for sure.