Source: http://uploads.mattersolutions.com.au/2012/11/networking.jpg

One of the points that Adrian covered in yesterday’s un-lecture thingymabob was the idea of joining all of our different social media outlets in order to create one network that forms our online identity. In other words, we were ‘weaving’ together our reputation.

This concept was both familiar and surprising to me. On one hand we are already used to consolidating our output on different social networking sites and sharing material laterally. My sounds on Soundcloud and videos on YouTube will 95% of the time be shared with my friends on Facebook and Tumblr, and more and more often artists are listing their Twitter and Instagram details in place of usual contact details like email or phone number. However, on the other hand the thought of doing the same thing for THIS blog sounded a bit counter-intuitive. Although a lot of my stuff online was already interconnected, I had still made sure that my social life and hobbies remained separate from anything professional or academic. I wasn’t interested in having a professor stumble upon some photo of me partying, or my friends reading my super formal essay.

But I guess that this is the reality which we’ll have to embrace as media professionals. Our online reputation becomes a fundamental part of our career, and if we can’t conduct ourselves on the internet in a way that accepts on both social and professional levels then we’ll run into trouble. Perhaps that means I should be more attentive of what I say on statuses, because as much as I’d like to hold onto the privacy of certain things from potential employers, in this day and age you’ve got to accept that you can pretty much have only ONE online identity, and choosing which one and how it’s going to represent you matters a whole lot more than I thought before.

Source: http://www.prlog.org/11676019-campingjournal103.jpg

One of the things I discovered to be the most daunting about writing blog posts is the fact that, while my work is still done for academic purposes and -at least partially- in order to get through the course, it is at the same time being open for the world to see. While I don’t have a million followers waiting on my every update, knowing that there are teachers and peers who are able to check out my stuff as soon as I hit Publish does make me still somewhat hesitant to post.

This is different to just handing in normal work to be looked over by my classmates or marked by tutors, because with those types of things I’ve had the time to look over them and assure myself that I’m not going to be completely humiliated if I leave it in the hands of another person. On the other hand, as was explained in my tutorial on Friday, blog posts are never necessarily finished products. They are thoughts, musings, off-the-cuff posts that don’t demand the same amount of refinement as an essay would. While this does better reflect the world we are living in today, as explained by Adrian in last week’s lecture, it still needs a bit of time to get accustomed.

When thinking about the blogging for this semester I often relate it back to the journal portfolio that haunted me in Writing Media Texts. It was a struggle then even to just write in a less formal tone for something that I knew was going to be assessed, but at least with that I knew it would only be seen by my teacher when the due date came after I had finished putting everything together, and not visible to everyone in the course every time I stuck in a new journal entry. I still had the time to get rid of stuff I didn’t like or add stuff that would help.

So I guess those are the concerns I’m dealing with in this post: informality and visibility. However, I have a feeling that they won’t be a problem down the track. Nevertheless, I felt it would be a good idea to document and voice it now anyway.