Labour day is an interesting name for a day on which many people do the complete opposite of labour.
In the absence of a lectorial due to Labour Day, we were given a reading by David GauntDavid Gauntlett’s reading for this week presented multiple ideas on the changing and evolving nature of media and communications study. The main concept was centred on the fact that with this shift in the study of media, there is a renewed sense that making and moving forwards is much more important than the analysing of texts and scholarly debates about data surveillance and capitalism. Gauntlett stressed that we must learn through media, rather than about media. It is through the practical, the making and doing, that we learn more about the possibilities of what media can create, how it can transform and what difference it can possibly make both in the mundane sphere and on a large scale. Gauntlett also wrote about how people in the everyday with the changing technologies and availability of media creation mediums are now more able than ever to create individual works, and inspire others to then make their own individual works and so on, evolving media culture exponentially as time goes on and popular involvement grows.
This idea of maker culture and individuals influencing media through their own inputs to the media landscape was something we touched on in our workshop on Wednesday. We focused especially on the use of social media such as Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat as a form of making and the ways in which people use them, as well as how their use and meaning had transformed over time as people’s attitudes towards them have altered. A prime example of this would be Twitter, once a booming social media platform for celebrities to share their lives with their fans and for their fans to then tweet and retweet these sentiments. However, over time, while there still is a major celebrity presence on twitter, the altering and use of other platforms has left Twitter as a much less prominent space for this kind of use, instead it is now almost entirely comprised of news from around the world by news corporations like Al Jazeera, BBC and the like. Instagram and Facebook have taken precedence as the way for celebrities as well as organisations to connect with everyday people. Businesses now have Facebook accounts and it has become entirely commonplace for people to complain and contact these businesses through their social media pages. This kind of corporate interaction through social media has, especially in the hospitality industry, revolutionised the way restaurants, bars and cafes advertise to potential customers. Food photography is rife on instagram, and more often than not places become destinations for people to eat at if they serve “instagrammable” food.
We also spoke about how snapchat had emerged as perhaps a more authentic way to interact ‘online’ with others, both known and strangers. Because of the difficulty in creating an image that isn’t a true representation of the reality being photographed, snapchats instantly become more trustworthy, more authentic. One classmate described it as a place to put things not good enough to post on other social media which sums it up nicely – for all those little, unimportant, silly things that we nonetheless wish to share. Perhaps it is the ephemeral nature of all of the images and videos we can send through snapchat that makes it seem more ‘real’ and relatable, more interesting and unique. In a world where just about everything you place on the internet is there forever, good or bad, regardless of who you are or how much money you have, it’s refreshing to have something where it is the complete opposite.
Gauntletts thoughts on media and its transformative abilities definitely sparked some interesting discussion. It makes me wonder how different social media in particular will be in only 5 years time, after a decade or more already of exponential growth from myspace and the like to now.
