Author Archives: eliseschumacher

NETWORKED MEDIA: FINAL ESSAY

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Media can refer to two separate concepts. The first is to the broad term used to cover the multitudes of organisations and institutions that produce forms of media, such as television, print and radio. The second is artefacts or “mediums” that are the byproduct of these institutions. For example, magazines, newspapers, videos, and photographs. According to “New Media: A Critical Analysis”, new media refers to a large prospect of “social, technological and cultural change…as part of a new technoculture”. Online media involves a series of practices that are exclusive to that breed of media, predominantly social media. This new type of media essentially questions what can be done with online media, and how it is incorporated into every day life. Social media is the component that is most predominantly associated with online media, which is distributed through platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter, as well as blogging engines such as Tumblr and WordPress. In order to successfully produce content for these sites, it is important to grasp the concepts of authoring, publishing and distributing online media.

Authoring is associated with writing or creating content, and can be produced by anybody. Specifically in the field of blogging, these online media distribution websites serve the purpose of “[allowing] a record to be maintained of ideas, reflections, activities” (Miles, 2006). Rather than a personal diary or journal, a blog is a public entry posted onto a public domain, and can be viewed by anyone with access to the blog URL. Creating content for a blog entails certain contributing factors that should be noted and guidelines that should be abided by. The first is ethics, whereby the code of conduct for authors outlines values, which is described by Louis A. Day as “a set of principles or a code of moral conduct”. For media practitioners, the term “ethics” is embodied in issues such as plagiarism and attribution, or when their work is unlawfully taken and published by someone else. This culture was most prevalent in my authoring during my seven days of consistent blogging, when I was required to document my use of online media over a week. In order to appropriately disclose a website or practice, it was essential to reference it or instead provide a hyperlink that led directly to the content. I found the MEAA Journalist Code of Ethics, as well as the Creative Commons Attribution Fact Sheet to be particularly useful, as it outlines what should be stated and why it should be stated. Additionally, an issue that was encountered was the repetitiveness and tediousness of explaining what online media was produced each day, and why it was produced. These questions were often difficult to answer, as producing content had become an automatic process that I engaged with every day as a means of self-expression. In my past experiences with blogging via Tumblr, I was projecting a highly personal reflection of myself onto my blog, and in doing so, I would only update when I felt it necessary. According to Susannah Stern from the University of San Diego, adolescents are constantly “trying to understand themselves and their role in a greater society (who am I?), [and we] frequently look to their social world for cues about what principles and traits to internalise”, hence the reason why we look to blogging as a means of “venting” and expressing oneself.

In blogging, publishing is related to the actual process of posting on online media platforms. The questions that were raised in the publishing sector of the consistent blogging task included why I favoured certain platforms over others, and what kind of content I chose to post on certain days. From a personal standpoint and as a relatively private person, the more control I had over the viewers of my content, the more likely I was to publish on that platform. For example, I found that I was favouring Instagram due to the fact that I could dominate who followed me and concurrently, was able to view and engage with the images and videos that I posted. In comparison to a platform like Facebook, where I have hundreds of “Friends”, of whom I only actively am friends with a handful, Instagram is more controlled and I am able to be significantly more selective. Another interesting insight enquired was whether the quality of a conversation reduced as the number of platforms that it took place on increased. I found that the more content I published and interacted with, the less meaningful the engagements became. This was characterised in a 2003 study by Yahoo! and Carat Interactive as “media multitasking”, which can be defined as “(using various media simultaneously), [which] is the Millennial’s specialty, and the growth in the amount of media being used by young people is largely explained by their multitasking behaviour…the [internet plays a central role in their multitasking”. This tendency to multitask and interact with various platforms at the same time was, retrospectively, an efficient way to communicate with several people at once, however the quality of the content that I was publishing suffered due to being so preoccupied simultaneously producing content on several other platforms.

The final aspect of blogging is distribution, which involves dispensing the content amongst several platforms. This is made simple within applications such as Instagram, which provides an option for users prior to posting their image or video, to simultaneously post to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Swarm, which you can link to your Instagram account. This maximises the degree of exposure that the post receives. An issue that I encountered at the distribution stage was my lack of desire to share my posts on all platforms. Due to my tendency to be relatively introverted and withdrawn person on social media, I didn’t feel an urgency to distribute my work amongst other sites. I was presented with the internal argument about why I went through certain documentation processes in order to distribute the content that I created. I had to consider why I took images predominantly on my iPhone, and why I gravitated towards posting images rather than text. The most basic answer to my questions were the elements of convenience associated with these online media practices. It seemed the most logical to stay connected by using the catalyst that I carried in my pocket and held in the palm of my hand: my phone. According to a study conducted in 2010 by the Pew Research Centre in Washington D.C., “three-quarters (75%) of teens and 93% of adults ages 18-29 now have a cell phone”. Our greatest social media stimulus is the phones that we are able to carry and utilise to document our days in the way that blogging was widely used a decade ago. We now “blog” our day through “vlogs” via Snapchat Stories and Instagram Stories and posting statuses on Facebook, which are much less tedious than writing a prose about the events of my day. The convenience of being able to document events at any part of the day adds to the appeal of utilising social media platforms as a form of microblogging.   

Retrospectively, some highly compelling insights were drawn from the consistent blogging task. It was found that the immediacy of microblogging on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat have become the preferred mode of blogging communication for millennials such as myself. Our desire to share and publish information has become an automatic process that requires little to no afterthought, and it is difficult to justify specifically why we feel the incessant need to constantly share certain information, with certain people, at certain times. I found that utilising multiple platforms at once enabled me to engage with a multitude of people at once in a bid to stay connected, however the standard of the conversations decreased as the amount of platforms rose. The process of authoring, publishing and distributing has been compressed for social media, making the creation of online media content accessible to anyone with a mobile device.

References:

  • Lister, Martin. Dovey, Jon. Giddings, Seth. Grant, Iain and Kieran Kelly. New Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 2009. p. 11. Print.
  • Foehr, U. (2006). Media Multitasking Among American Youth: Prevalence, Predictors and Pairings. 1st ed. Washington: The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, pp.1-5.
  • Creative Commons Australia. (2017). How to attribute Creative Commons licensed materials. [online] Available at: http://creativecommons.org.au/learn/fact-sheets/attribution/ [Accessed 4 Apr. 2017].
  • Stern, Susannah. “Producing Sites, Exploring Identities: Youth Online Authorship”. Youth, Identity and Digital Media (2008): pp. 96-114. Print.
  • Miles, Adrian. “Blogs in Media Education: A Beginning.” Australian Screen, Ed. 41 (2006): 66-9.
  • Day, Louis A. Ethics In Media Communications Cases And Controversies. 1st ed. California: Thomson Wadsworth, (2005): pp. 3-5. Print.
  • Lenhart, Amanda. “Social Media And Mobile Internet Use Among Teens And Young Adults.”. Social Media and Young Adults (2010): pp. 3-5. Print.

NETWORKED MEDIA: ANALYSIS POST 3

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The internet is a wide, wonderful, and fast-evolving place. In the words of Lovink (2012), “once the internet changed the world, now the world is changing the internet”. In the same way that the television is the electronic hearth of a modern day home, the internet is the catalyst for a modern day social life.

Instead of hardcopy party invitations, we create Facebook events. Instead of complementing our friends dress in real life, we comment on their photos. Instead of composing and posting a letter, we send an email. Instead of scouring a newspaper for information, we type a query into a search engine.

We are constantly and endlessly connected to the internet and every account on every platform somehow intertwines with the next.

Stephen Hill, in his book “The Tragedy of Technology” suggests that the “direction of change is a product of the particular alignment between the technological possibilities and the societies and culture that exists”, which would mean that the technology that we engage with, the online media that is so heavily embedded in our lives, is a reflection of the capabilities of ourselves. As we develop, the means by which we communicate does also, hence why we are so technologically switched on, because our communicative devices are the same.

Looking back retrospectively on my week of constant blogging, I became hyper-aware of my Internet tendencies. As Internet culture has evolved, so have I. For example, as Facebook grew and developed into a social media application, the meme renaissance began, and features such as tagging became more widely utilised.

 

NETWORKED MEDIA: ANALYSIS POST 2

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By day five of consistent blogging, I had come to an incredibly interesting question: does the quality of the communication reduce as the modes of communication increases?

This question was raised by noticing that I was using several platforms to communicate with the same person at the same time. For example, I would Snapchat my best friend the snack I was eating while also tagging him in memes on Facebook. Our conversations on each respective platform were disjointed and had no profound meaning or purpose, and didn’t have a fulfilling ending. Instead, they just broke off after one of us got busy or forgot to reply.

Instead of maintaining a steady and sustaining conversation that involved equal participation via a singular platform, I communicated trivial occurrences that happen in my day to day life via a variety of applications. I maintained these lighthearted conversations in my busy life and was able to stay in touch with the people I cared about without having to get stuck in a drawn-out conversation. For a bad replier such as myself, these are convenient, however the quality of the conversations declined significantly.

In this day and age, the conversations we have take place predominantly online, and it is here that communication has evolved most. Social media enables us to have multiple conversations at one time, when it was only less than four decades ago that conversations prominently took place face-to-face.

So, does the quality of a conversation reduce when the amount of platforms that it takes place on increases? Certainly. My conversations became broken and less profound when the amount of platforms multiplied.

NETWORKED MEDIA: ANALYSIS POST 1

Posted on by under Media 3

 

In the aftermath of 7 days of consistent blogging, it is safe to suggest that we are all blogged out. However, in light of this activity, some very interesting questions have been raised about the ways by which I engage with social media, why I have developed these practices and perhaps where these practices have stemmed from.

The element of consistent blogging that I probably struggled with the most was my exploration of the question why? It felt extremely foreign to have to explain why I like certain photos, why I post particular things, why I use a specific platform for a specific purpose, and why I do it at a precise time of the day. I had never felt the need to take a step back and ponder why I had adopted particular media practises and how they had even come about, but once I did, some very interesting concepts came to light.

Firstly, I realised that I have developed a strong impulse to post on Instagram and send pictures via Snapchat. I wondered why this was, and came to the conclusion that Instagram is probably my most private social media platform, as I have been very conscious about who follows me and who is able to view my account. My Instagram account is private, and I only approve follow requests from people whom I know very well and have an invested interest in. I do not follow celebrities or bloggers and keep my Instagram as a selective diary of my every day life as well as a means of keeping up with my 62 followers whom I mutually follow. In regards to Snapchat, the concept of control comes in to play again, this time due to the fact that I can choose whom I send my content to, similar to sending messages, instead with images.

I can be a very private person, and I feel that Instagram and Snapchat were the most convenient means of expressing myself and documenting my life while also being very particular with who views my content. This bids a very interesting question: is anything that is posted on the Internet really personal? Is it possible to lead a private life while engaging with online media?

My answer is yes. However, monitoring, surveillance, and privacy settings are essential in doing so. Adjusting my settings and ensuring my accounts are private have made my life as private as I would like it to be. There is a certain extent to which I would like to be engaged with online media, and I am able to draw my own line and be selective with who follows me and views my content. The more private my account is, the more comfortable I feel disclosing information about myself on the respective platform.

MY MEDIA USE: DAY 7

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Today marked the final day of documenting our media usage, and it began the same way almost every other day this week did. I woke up and browsed my notifications, responding to a few. I had uni today and when I arrived home in the evening, I posted again on Instagram, this time a picture of the cityscape that I had taken on my iPhone 7 in the afternoon.

I captioned the photo “my love for this city is boundless”, and shared the photo with my small platform of followers. I went onto Facebook and shared a video about legalising LGBTIQ marriage and then headed to bed. I didn’t caption the video, as it was highly self explanatory, however this action of sharing carried a lot of weight for me as I rarely to never share anything on Facebook at all.

Below is an image of the applications that most consume my battery usage, which accurately represents the applications that I most use. Note the percentages of Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook, in relation to the other apps.

I thought a lot about what I had learned about myself and the ways that I had communicated and connected with online media over the space of a week. I had come to several realisations about what platforms I favoured and why I favoured them (particularly Instagram and Snapchat). I developed a more profound understanding of how online media has embedded itself into the fabric our everyday lives, particularly in the form of social media. Staying connected has become so essential to existing, particularly as a millennial, even to the extent of communicating with the same person on several platforms at once. Communication has evolved into this lifestyle, with our catalyst resting in our back pockets and the palms of our hands. Social media means something different to everyone, but this week I realised what it truly meant to me. It is an entity that exists as part of my life, but online medias limitlessness is something that I am fully capable of separating myself from.

MY MEDIA USE: DAY 6

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Sunday. The day of rest. Except for the fact that I work every Sunday and I am not familiar with the concept of rest. When I got back from work, I spent some time on Tumblr, a blogging service I avidly used a few years ago. I was in the spirit of blogging every day, and I decided to give my old blog a revamp and post a life update. I used to have a large platform on this site, and communicated with thousands of users at once before I got Facebook and neglected my blog. I lost a lot of followers in the years since, but I was surprised to find that I still had 500+ followers after all this time had elapsed.

This is the only platform that actually requires me to “author” content, to write freely and to post snapshots of myself in a creative and honest way. I uploaded a picture of myself at a winery that had been taken by my sister last week attached to the short paragraph about my absence from Tumblr and what I had been up to. I described my first year at University and the changes that had happened since my last personal post. I reblogged some travel pictures and considered why I had stopped blogging.

I pondered what I was doing with online media and how online media had evolved since my last post in late 2014. In early 2015, I made a Facebook account and found that a considerable amount of my time is now spent on Facebook, which is worlds apart from a platform like Tumblr. For me, Tumblr was my private, online journal for me to document my high school trials and tribulations as well as my personal thoughts and dreams. I even posted my own bucket list on there once upon a time. Facebook, for me however, is a platform upon which I am significantly more careful with what I post, mostly because I personally know everyone I have on Facebook, whereas on Tumblr, I was more comfortable expressing my true thoughts, feelings and ambitions to strangers.

MY MEDIA USE: DAY 5

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Today was Saturday, and once again, I spent the day at work. When I got home, I collapsed on my bed and logged into the Facebook and mindlessly scrolled through my feed, chuckling at dumb memes and tagging my friends in them.

For my friends who don’t have Facebook, saved the memes to my camera roll and sent them either in our collective group chats, or via iMessage.

Retreospectively, by doing this, I raised the question about how I communicate via online media. Before I made a Facebook account, my only means of communication was via Instagram and Snapchat, but in the years since, I have found that Facebook has opened up a variety of different modes of connection. The first and most obvious would be Messenger, Facebook’s own messaging service, followed by Timelines, a place where Friends are able to post public photos, messages, videos and various other content. The last, which has become much more widely used in recent years since the meme renaissance would be the “tagging” feature, which allows for people to directly link others to a post on Facebook.

Sometimes I find myself talking to a specific person on several platforms at once; sending photos via Snapchat, messaging via iMessage, tagging each other in memes via Facebook, and sending pictures to each other on Instagram. This seems so bizarre to me, communication is amplified and multiplied by four or five times. However, this poses a larger question: does the quality of the communication reduce as the modes of communication increases?

MY MEDIA USE: DAY 4

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Ahhh, Friday. I am so glad you are here. Not that I have the weekend off to enjoy the last of this year’s sunshine, but the weekend is a mere 24 hours away and another week of uni will be over.

I had today to catch up on my uni work before work in the evening. So naturally, I spent the day procrastinating and watching makeup tutorials on YouTube rather than actually taking advantage of the time to be productive. I watched a plethora of tutorials about makeup and skincare, which are topics that I am particularly passionate about.

I left a comment on one of the videos that I watched encouraging the artist to keep up the good work. I get very paranoid about commenting on YouTube videos mainly due to the extreme negativity that is present on that specific platform. I’ve found that commenters on Youtube tend to be quite critical of content creators, and keyboard warriors can be extremely malicious when they are able to hide behind the facade of their devices. Even positive reinforcement and constructive criticism can be misinterpreted behind a screen so it’s very rare that I comment or engage with content online. 

I tend to watch a lot of content on YouTube for the main purpose of education. I am a very visual learner, so being taught how to do anything from creating a makeup look to making a breakfast burrito, is made so simple with a resource that enables me to watch how things are done, rather than reading or listening about it.

 

MY MEDIA USE: DAY 3

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Today I decided to mix things up a little. I started work at 9a.m. and for the first time I was working at Melbourne Central, so the time that I usually take to check my notifications in the morning was overrode by my desperate need for the rare commodity of sleep. I fumbled onto the 7:34 train at Dandenong Station and plugged my headphones into my ears and hit play on my Spotify playlist. I arrived at work and only took the time to check my social media notifications on my morning tea break, by which time they had doubled. I went onto Instagram and took a Boomerang of the LUSH Melbourne Central store, letting my followers know that I was working there and to come down and say hello.   

I took the Boomerang with my iPhone 7 and uploaded it to my Instagram story as a means of distribution. I only posted it to Instagram as I’m only followed by people on there whom I’d actually like to come see me at work, instead of having strangers show up to my workplace. I added my location to the GIF, which is a feature on the app as well.

Retrospectively, today I was short on time and wasn’t necessarily able to actively engage with online media in the way that I generally would.

 

MY MEDIA USE: DAY 2

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It’s a new day of documenting my media use, and today’s regime has been very similar to yesterday’s. Today I woke up and checked my notifications, responding to a few Snapchats and liking the posts that I have been tagged in on Facebook. Today was my day off, so I decided to log onto Netflix and indulge in some ‘Bates Motel’.

I sent out a Snapchat of this to my friends and ended up having a conversation with my best friend about what episode he was up to and how shocking the season final had been. The picture included my laptop with a screen-cap of the episode as well as a cup of tea on my lap.

I sent out that Snapchat in order to let the people whom I frequently communicate with know that I finally had a day off after what felt like decades, and I was absolutely and without a doubt enjoying it in the laziest way possible. I’m beginning to notice that it feels really strange explaining why I do certain things on social media, because I’ve never really given much thought as to why I do them, I simply just do. They’ve effortlessly become automatic processes that are apart of my day and every day life now.

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