My online media use for the week can be grouped into two broad categorisations: university work, and personal communication/entertainment. Within these categories there are different types of engagement (including most significantly whether I am consuming or creating material), and drilling down even further shows that I often engage with different online media platforms in the same way or for the same ultimate purpose.

My university work included a lot of communication on Facebook and in group messages. The most significant engagement we had with online media was using Soundcloud to publish our demo recording. We were able to use Soundcloud internally within our group to make notes and write annotations on the show itself (using the platform’s timestamped comments), and since it’s public we could also show the demo to others in our class or in the general public if we wish. We submitted the Soundcloud link to our studio leader for assessment too, so it has been tied into every aspect of our work from beginning to end. As we’re all so physically dispersed and can’t often meet up in person, this enabled a level of collaboration that would never have been possible otherwise.

In my personal use of online media, I noted that I often use it for unproductive uses: passive consumption of material on my Facebook news feed, browsing through people’s Instagram photos, etc. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I did notice that the scale of productive/unproductive use is heavily skewed in one direction, at least for the week I was observing my use. Had I not just come back from holiday in Japan, I wouldn’t have had dozens of photographs to publish on my own social media, and may not have actually used online media for creation at all this week.

I think one of the main take-aways from this exercise is that while I haven’t done much creation or media making myself this week, I’ve been fortunate to have seen how others are using online media in a way that supports their work or creative expression, and which I might be able to take advantage of myself. On Day 6 of my data collection the S-Town podcast was released, and I spent about 15 minutes that day poring over the S-Town Facebook page (and have since devoured photos and other material posted to the S-Town subreddit). There are photos of the “characters” in the podcast, pictures and maps of the real-life locations, and discussions around the meaning and interpretation of the podcast. This made S-Town feel almost like an exercise in multi-platform storytelling, where you don’t get the complete picture just from listening to the audio and must search out other materials to round out the experience and fill in the blanks. I can imagine using techniques like these myself if I ever release a serious podcast series, or explore the possibilities of photojournalism, or any number of other ways I can use online media to augment my media practice. Now that I’m more aware of my own online media use, I can start to identify opportunities and take advantage of the affordances of online media.