Day two of dissecting my online media presence was a hectic one… Saturday as a young person with a social life, as a Restaurant Manager and as a university student – it’s a full on day! I took the time to reflect on what part of my online media presence dominated the day, and as I’m setting up a new store for my business, I found that the path of communicative media became priority, and as such, iMessage is the route that I’m delving into today.

iMessage is Apple’s way of ‘free’ messaging. I put free into quotations because of course, with everything, nothing comes free. This unique messaging system has been with us since late 2011, early 2012 and has literally had the world divided since. iMessage is a great system for busy people on the go, as well as getting group messages going and being able to send multimedia. While you can do the majority of these things with regular SMS messaging, iMessage is instant and a lot easier to use rather than the old version of messaging. The key is, with iMessage, the people who are sharing the texts need to all be Apple products – simply speaking, a Nokia and an iPhone would not be able to iMessage each other. I can iMessage my contacts off my MacBook, iPhone, iPod Touch and more products which makes the system interchangeable between products, so if you can’t find your phone you can still message contacts through the other means. I find myself sending anywhere up to 100 iMessage texts a day, especially on busy work days or nights out with friends. I would say that about 90% of my contacts have Apple products, so sending iMessages are a lot more accessible nowadays that most people have these Mac products. There is a double-edged-sword with iMessage as I mentioned before, and that is that it uses up phone data rather than costing money for each individual text. So, with some phone company plans that people purchase, a part of their contract is free text messages… so why would someone use up their internet data for iMessage when they get free texts? As well as this, a multimedia iMessage uses up 3x the data of a normal iMessage… this is a lot of data, especially when internet does not come cheap on mobile plans.

So, studying my online media today has been consumed by iMessage, and what a world it is!