Ask anyone on the street, and chances are they’ve spent some time looking through a blog or two.
It’s estimated that as of 2018, there were over 500 million blogs on the internet. And now I’m joining the hype!
I want to preface this by saying, it’s not like I haven’t blogged before. I very much have – but in a different sense. As part of my journalism degree, I have a blog where I share and reflect on hard news stories and make reflections of core journalistic values. This blog took on the professional persona I wanted it to; becoming a serious platform, sharing serious news issues, that I was serious about. (And if you’re serious too you can view it here – but no pressure). But I want this blog to be different.
Why?
Because the visual architecture of a blog matters a LOT, and so does updating it frequently. And that wasn’t something I was concerned about in my last blog. Within Adrien Miles’ Blogs in Media Education: A Beginning, he suggests that blogs help us to recognise that our work is making a contribution to the wider community. A blog is a public forum, which allows ideas, thoughts and activities to be easily recorded and archived. (Miles, 2006 pg.67)
It is this hyper-textual element of a blog which makes it both easily retrievable and also a constantly evolving array of sources. How convenient is it when every product your favourite blogger writes about, is linked within the blog post? It makes the flow of information simple, easy to access and fast. This is something I hope to achieve within this blog.
Something else that stood out to me this week was in Dr Sabine Niederer’s 2018 lecture, Networked Images: Visual Methodologies for the digital age. Niederer suggests that images become networked when they are liked, shared, commented and tagged by users. The networking process also happens when engines and platforms “format, filter, and recommend them to others”.
This had me thinking about my own Instagram experience, whereby someone’s content and photos of which I engage with – eg. beauty brand Nivea, is then fed back and recommended to me. This happens all the time! See below …
Niederer also discusses the idea of visual vernaculars, which differ for each social media platform. For Instagram, this vernacular or “platform literacy” is experience based.
“Instagram is a social network that is built around image and
aesthetics, and this concept is reflected in its merged image.” (Niederer, 2018)The picture below is one I found on the “explore” section of Instagram. With the use of its location, and the actual image content itself; a sunset is both aesthetically pleasing to Instagram users, and an experience they would’ve likely had. (We’ve all seen a sunset, yeah?)
https://www.instagram.com/pvtraveldiaries/
Focusing this semester on the affordances of Instagram, this “experience based aesthetic” is something I will keep in mind.
Something else important to note from Niederer’s lecture is that visual architecture matters; the things that get positioned on the top is what gets seen. The position of what gets on the top relies on what the community is engaging with.
I’m looking forward to this semester in Networked Media, so stay tuned in this little corner of the internet for more updates and Instagram/blogging discussions!
Until next week,
Bethany 🙂
(Now go have a slice of chocolate – you’ve earned it)
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Sources:
Niederer, S 2018, Networked images: visual methodologies for the digital age. Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Amsterdam (pp.1-20).
Miles, A 2006, “‘Blogs in Media Education: A Beginning’.” Australian Screen Ed, vol 41, pp 66–9.