By auditing my own online media use for a week, I was able to shed light on my habits and make a significant discovery that could allow my creative practice to take advantage of the internet. For this essay, rather than evaluating my online media use as a whole I have chosen instead to explore that discovery, and extrapolate it forward to some logical extensions relevant to media makers like myself.

Perhaps the most powerful affordance of digital media is that it’s network-ready by default. Since the internet is a digital medium, it’s trivially easy to upload artefacts of sound, video or text to the internet, where they can be hosted and distributed around the world with universal accessibility (Siapera 2012, pp. 3-4). By using hypertext to create links and relationships between such media artefacts, practitioners can open up the powerful new dimension of multi-platform storytelling, where the constraints of old media no longer apply (Alexander & Levine 2008, pp. 41-42). Using such techniques, authors can create experiences that are self-directed by the audience and may not necessarily be consumed in the form or order envisioned by the author (Alexander & Levine 2008, p. 47), but which to the audience feels significantly richer, more autonomous and more immersive as a result.

A current example of media makers using such techniques is the S-Town podcast, which released its entire series of seven episodes during the week I was auditing my online media use. Immediately after the series went live the S-Town Facebook page was updated with photos taken by the producers from locations significant to the story, links to further discussion, and other material that allowed listeners to get a fuller picture of the podcast and its characters. This material was not essential to the story, but for audience members who desired a deeper understanding of its central themes the multi-platform component offered a number of ways for them to remain engaged in the story. In my personal experience, while listening to the podcast I was able to hop over to the S-Town Facebook page, to Wikipedia, reddit and other web-based locations to fill in gaps in my knowledge (particularly around clocks, which form a central symbol in S-Town as the main character is an antiquarian horologist). This altered my experience of the podcast in a major way, particularly when compared to other narrative-documentary podcasts that don’t have such strong web presences. As social media becomes further enmeshed into society, this kind of user-directed engagement with media will only continue to increase (Hinton & Hjorth 2013, pp. 2-3).

S-Town was produced by the team that made Serial, a podcast series that made even heavier use of its web presence and social media platforms to tell the story of Adnan Syed, a teenager convicted of a 1999 murder. When each episode of the podcast was published, the Serial website was updated with supporting material like maps, letters, timelines, and real-life evidence from the case, giving listeners a rich tapestry of material to combine into the complete murder-mystery story. Serial was such a runaway success that it has been called the “most popular podcast in the history of the form” (Carr 2014), with its success attributed to the story’s extensive depth and the quality of its reporting.

I have made tentative use of multi-platform storytelling techniques to support my own media practice in the past, though I am yet to embark on any major storytelling projects of my own. In 2016 I made a three-minute short film about my brother, who has kept a collection of dozens of novelty rubber erasers for 30 years. The film contains a number of close-up shots of individual erasers from his collection, and separate to the short film I uploaded extra photographs of his collection to Flickr and embedded the gallery in my blog, allowing my audience to get a closer look at the subject of my film. This is admittedly a very cursory, surface-level experimentation with multi-platform publishing, but it illustrates how using networked media (and free platforms like Vimeo and Flickr) opens up a powerful ecosystem for media makers like me even on a small scale.

Multi-platform storytelling offers exciting possibilities in a number of other disciplines, too. For example, a tourism and travel brand could combine online media like Google Maps, streaming video, photography and podcasting to create an interconnected series of city guides and walking tours that are self-directed, nonlinear and allow travelers to experience a city in a way that best suits their own interests. A team of journalists could take advantage of some of the advances associated with Web 2.0, such as multiple authors and “microcontent” (Alexander & Levine 2008, p. 42), to collaborate on a story that takes an event or incident and unfolds outwards, forming a single whole with multiple entry/exit points and the ability to update the story indefinitely. Museums could use new media to bring new dimensions to their physical collections. Fiction storytellers could experiment with subjectivity and experience in their narrative projects. Educators could use networked media to allow students to learn at their own direction and at their own pace.

There are, of course, significant risks that must be considered when using online media in creative practice. By weaving a work into the fabric of the internet — such as by using existing publishing platforms, or by allowing the audience to drop in and out of the story and complete their own research — the author necessarily loses some control over the experience of consuming the work. In extreme cases, the question of who can lay proper claim to being the “author” of the work could even be called into question. There is also a risk associated with the fact that stability and longevity depend on internet access and hosting being available and affordable in perpetuity. Many early examples of multi-platform storytelling, cited in academic studies and media guides, are now no longer readily accessible on the web. One important example, the Pulitzer Prize-nominated news series The Crossing, was lost when the newspaper that published it went out of business, and the series (which consisted of 33 articles plus supporting photography and video, all presented in a bespoke online interface) was only saved because the author happened to have the series backed up on a DVD (Lafrance 2015).

But assuming the risks can be adequately mitigated, the potential new avenues of expression and creativity enabled by network-connected, multi-platform storytelling far outweigh the potential risks and disadvantages. As a media practitioner I’m excited by the sheer number of opportunities presented to me by new media, even as those opportunities also seem overwhelming.

References

Alexander, B. & Levine, A. (2008), ‘Web 2.0 Storytelling: Emergence of a New Genre’ in Educause Review, 43(6), pp. 40-56.

Carr, D. (2015), ‘‘Serial,’ Podcasting’s First Breakout Hit, Sets Stage for More’, The New York Times [online], <https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/business/media/serial-podcastings-first-breakout-hit-sets-stage-for-more.html>, [accessed 9 April 2017]

Hinton, S. & Hjorth, L. (2013), Understanding Social Media, London: SAGE Publications.

Lafrance, A. (2015), ‘Raiders of the Lost Web’, The Atlantic [online], <https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/raiders-of-the-lost-web/409210/> [accessed 9 April 2017]

Siapera, E. (2012), Understanding New Media, London: SAGE Publications.

I need to do a lot of additional research to inform my essay. So far I’ve written a lot about my own experience and made observations about how I might possibly be able to use online media to support my media practice, but I haven’t backed it up with any concrete research or academic material. I think I’ve identified an area that I’m interested in (using online/social media to support creative practice), but I now need to go and find supporting material to push my thinking further.

My documentation is relatively comprehensive (at least for the purpose at hand), and should give me enough material to work with, but even in the areas where my documentation is lacking I have personal history and experience to draw on and fill in any gaps. In my essay I’m not going to discuss the use of online media for personal (passive) reasons, such as mindlessly browsing a Facebook news feed, so those parts of my documentation will be mostly useless to me now. But I’m glad I collected it anyway, if only for me to realise how much unproductive time I spend on social media.

One major thing I still need to do is come up with a mission statement, a purpose for my essay. It could be a question that I set out to answer, or it could be a statement that I set out to prove or disprove… I haven’t really come up with anything yet, but I’m working on it.

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.

I’ve spent the last week documenting my online media use, examining how I use the internet and reflecting on what it brings to my life and work. I enumerated the platforms I used, what I used each of them for, and how many times I accessed them. There were some things I left out: if I listed every time I sent a photo of a cute puppy to my girlfriend, for example, I would quickly run out of room for anything else.

But what my documentation did find is that, at least this week, the vast majority of my online media use has been consumption rather than creation. As someone who dabbles in media making regularly (photography, writing, podcasting, etc.) I usually use the internet for publishing purposes much more often than I did this week. Rarely a week goes by without me posting some photos to Instagram, or writing film reviews on Letterboxd, but this week I browsed Instagram and Letterboxd while barely posting to them at all. Part of the reason for this is that I had a couple of university assessments due this week, so I had less time to spend on my own extracurricular media making. How I use the internet for creation, and why I did less of that this week than I normally do, is something for me to consider and evaluate further.

Early in the week I started off meticulously documenting the platforms I used as I was using them, collating everything into a post at the end of each day, but as the week went on I slacked off a little and just took stock of what I’d used at the end of each day without doing any real-time documentation. It greatly helped that most social media platforms now have a stream or log of your activity, which meant that I could just look through my activity log and get an idea of how much I’d been using each platform, rather than writing anything down myself. I suspect if someone had observed me full-time and noted down what I was doing, rather than relying on the strength of my own recollection, I would have collected much more information than I did. But as it is, I think what I’ve done gives me a good, well-rounded idea of my online media habits.

Overcast

Late yesterday the team behind This American Life and Serial released the S-town podcast, which I’ve been excited to listen to for months. They’ve released every episode at the same time (Netflix style) to encourage binge-listening, so today I downloaded all seven episodes and began listening using my podcast app Overcast. While listening to the first episode I had a look at the S-town website and Facebook page, where they had posted a bunch of media related to the podcast. There were photos of the people involved in the story, links to reviews and analysis of the podcast, etc., which provided a nice multi-platform experience while I was listening to the audio.

Serial was really exemplary at posting supporting materials and digital media online to help their listeners become immersed in the story. It’s something I’ll keep in mind for my own creative practice in the future, making sure to really take advantage of the distribution platform provided by social media websites.

Facebook and Instagram

First thing in the morning I was tagged in a post on Facebook announcing that DJ Shadow would be touring Australia soon. I took the link I was tagged in and shared it with some friends in Facebook Messenger to give them a heads up and perhaps organise buying tickets together.

Again, today I didn’t interact with social media websites in terms of creation or publication, but I did passively browse and consume material on Facebook and Instagram.

Book club

My book club was meeting in the evening to discuss this month’s book (Submission by Michel Houellebecq) so I took some time in the afternoon to read reviews and discussion pieces on the controversial novel. I read pieces in The Guardian, The New York Times and The New Yorker, and they gave me some interesting insights into the book and some points to discuss at my book club.

Wednesday was a big day for me in terms of university work. I had a 1,000-word essay due for my Documentary Studies class, and my studio group had booked time at 3RRR in the afternoon to record a demo for our hour-long radio programme.

Soundcloud

The RRR studio is set up with an integrated computer that can capture and record anything that goes through the mixing panel. This is how we recorded our demo programme, using Audacity on the studio computer to record the output of our programme, which I then dumped to a USB drive as an MP3. After I got home I uploaded the show to Soundcloud and shared the link with my group in our Facebook group so that we could all annotate it with notes and comments. This is how we’ll submit the demo for assessment purposes to our studio leader.

Facebook

Surprisingly, looking at my Facebook activity log, I barely interacted with Facebook for consumption/entertainment purposes today. Most of my activity took place in my studio group’s private Facebook group, where we discussed and coordinated our arrival at RRR and made sure that everyone was still on track to record our demo. Georgia, one of the members of our group, has been terribly sick for a couple of weeks so we’ve all made deliberate efforts to make sure our discussions occur online, so Georgia can still be involved and in the loop even though she’s not physically present. We posted a couple of comment threads: one to discuss errors and mistakes in the demo (which we’ll collate into a single list for when we present our demo to the class), and one for potential social media posts that could accompany our show. I also posted a photo I took of our presenters and guest in the studio, which we will use for our reflection posts and could be used for other social media purposes in the future.

Blackboard / RMIT Library

After I’d finished working on our demo, I moved on to finishing my essay for Documentary Studies. I accessed a number of journals, websites and other resources I had found that were relevant to my essay. I found most of these by searching Google Scholar or by searching the RMIT Library website for terms like “documentary ethics” and The Thin Blue Line (the film my essay is about). Some of the sources I found include:

• Journal of Mass Media Ethics
• The New York Times
• Screen journal
• Screen Education journal
• Introduction to Documentary by Bill Nichols

I downloaded copies of these resources to my computer and printed them out so I could physically highlight relevant passages, before then hand-typing those passages back into my essay working document. This is the first essay I’ve completed without using any offline sources at all, so these online resources were very useful in completing my work.

Today was a bit of an off day, since I spent most of it getting over a cold and taking things easy, knowing that I have two uni assessments to work on tomorrow.

NBA TV

Today I spent a lot of time watching NBA games through the NBA app on my Apple TV. I have an NBA League Pass subscription so I’m able to switch between games at will, and since basketball is one of my favourite sports I can spend hours at a time watching games for entertainment.

YouTube

A new music video by Danny Brown for the song “Ain’t It Funny” (directed by Jonah Hill), was released today so I went and watched it on YouTube. While there, for some reason I was reminded of Tay Zonday and his song “Chocolate Rain”, which became a meme hit in around 2007. I posted the video to my Facebook profile, because I was so incredulous as to why this particular song became such a massive hit. It looks ridiculous today, so I was hoping to remind my friends of how ridiculous 2007 internet culture was and see if they had anything interesting or funny to say about it.

I spend Monday mornings in my studio from 8:30am to 12:30pm, so apart from a quick check of my Facebook feed when I first woke up I didn’t engage with any online media in the morning.

Google Drive

My studio group used Google Drive to collaborate on a running sheet for our first project — an hour-long demo radio program for 3RRR. We were all physically sitting at the same table, but we used Google Docs to create a document that we could all edit in real time during our discussion. We shared ideas, edited each other’s ideas, and refined our running sheet into something we could use that afternoon when we had booked a practice session at RRR.

Snapchat

My studio group had a practice session at RRR in the afternoon, and I took a quick video from my point of view in the studio and posted it to Snapchat. I have a group Snapchat with some of my closest friends in which we like to post “what I’m up to today” style posts, so I sent the video to that group to share what I was up to today. I also sent the snap to my girlfriend and a couple of other friends whom I thought might be interested.

Overcast

On my way home I listened to a couple of podcasts while riding my scooter, on my phone using the app Overcast. Specifically, I listened to Brooke Gladstone’s appearance on the Longform podcast, and then a back episode of Crimetown, both of which were at the top of an ongoing playlist I use to keep track of what I want to listen to. Later, at home, I changed it up and started listening to an old episode of U Talking U2 to Me?.

Netflix

After I got home in the afternoon I threw on Arrested Development on Netflix and did some cleaning up around the house. I then sat down to do some study and kept the TV on, to give me a little bit of noise in the background (which sometimes helps me study). This is something I often do when I’m trying to be productive, as I don’t work well with silence and need something, either music or a TV show I’ve watched a thousand times, to keep me focused.

Facebook

While studying, I noticed myself starting to procrastinate and decided to channel that into something productive. I still have a bunch of photos I took on my trip to Japan that I still need to upload to Facebook, so I took them off my SD card (the photos were taken on my Canon 1000D camera) and uploaded them to my #japantrip album. I decided against doing any post-processing on the photos before I uploaded them to Facebook, but I did meticulously list the locations in which each photo was taken and tagged my girlfriend in any photos of her. My purpose for posting these photos on Facebook was to share my travel experiences with friends and family, especially if someone had recommended we visit a particular place that we ended up loving. I’ve really enjoyed sharing all the fun things we did on my first overseas trip.

Sunday was spent mostly doing homework, downloading uni readings, taking notes and working on assignments. What online media I did consume was mostly for education and entertainment.

RSS

In the morning I went through my RSS feeds (in the Mac RSS reader called Reeder) and cleared out a backlog of around 180 articles that were unread. Around 20 items were saved to my Instapaper queue for future reading, one video post was starred to watch later, and the rest I skimmed through and marked as read. RSS, along with Facebook, is one of the major ways I keep in touch with the things I’m interested in online: blogs, news sites, writers I follow, etc. I often go days or weeks at a time without looking at RSS, though, and thus have to periodically do a big clean-out of everything in my feeds, which is what I did today.

Netflix

In the evening my girlfriend and I sat down with dinner and watched the two new Dave Chappelle comedy specials that were recently added to Netflix. I’ve been looking forward to these specials since they were announced months ago, and Sunday night was the first chance I got to watch them. Watching Netflix over dinner is something we do very regularly, probably 5-6 times a week, as we’re big movie/TV buffs and like to keep up with new television like Westworld, Game of Thrones, etc..

Bandcamp

Last week I received an email from Kickstarter informing me that a project I backed (a new album from the Sydney band sleepmakeswaves) had been fulfilled and I could download their album from Bandcamp using a download key. I didn’t get around to actually downloading the album until Sunday, but I immediately added it to my iTunes, synced it to my phone, and then played it in the kitchen while I was cooking dinner. Part of the reason I listened to the album immediately is that sleepmakeswaves are friends of mine and I wanted to be able to share my thoughts on the album with them.

Whenever I listen to music on my phone, the app Last.fm keeps track of each track I play and saves it to my profile.

Today I spent comparatively little time online, as I helped a friend move house in the afternoon and then hung out with friends in the evening, giving me much less time to consume or create media during the day than I would normally have. I still found the time to do some things, though.

Facebook

I engaged in some light Facebook browsing.

• Liked an AFLWomen’s video about Erin Phillips celebrating Adelaide’s premiership win with her parents. I’m a big fan of the AFLW and like a lot of their posts on social media
• I shared a cute video of a corgi I came across in the Dogspotting group. My girlfriend is obsessed with corgis and so whenever I come across a video of one, I share it with her in Messenger
• My RMIT studio’s group chat continued from yesterday

Letterboxd

On Saturday night my friends and I got together and watched The Room on a makeshift outdoor cinema set up in a backyard. I added the film to my diary on Letterboxd, and two of my friends wrote short reviews of the film, both of which I liked. This was a good way of keeping the communal viewing vibe going ever after I’d gone home. While I was on Letterboxd and reading through my timeline I added a few movies to my watchlist and liked a list created by someone else (“HBO Documentary Films”) in order to save it for later.