When I wake up the first thing I do in the morning is check my phone. After looking at the time and seeing if anyone texted me my thumb autopilots to instagram and will continue to do so throughout the day even if I don’t realise it or consciously go looking to check my instagram feed. Listening to the lecture and doing my readings this week on the topic social media, I began to think about how instagram fit into the concept new media. Elaine my tutor explained “when talking about new media, you are also talking about the existence of social media” to understand this better she gave the class the pot plant metaphor:

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The Pot Plant is a Micro environment. Where the bowl (Pottery) is new media, the roots inside are social media and the leaves are the platform for example; Instagram. This helped me understand that you cant just look at Instagram you have to look beyond the platforms and at the concept of new media to understand how social media and the platforms work.  What intrigued me the most was the concept the people or the users of these platforms and social networks and the impact the users have on the eventual progression of platforms and occurrence of new ones all together.

Another Huge insight I gained from this weeks lecture was the notion that New Media is different to Media in three ways. firstly that new media is digital, its online and its ALWAYS evolving with how society progresses. According to Cambridge Dictionary new media means “using computers or the internet” (Cambridge Dictionary, 2018). I guess thinking about this in more detail or in terms of my course prompt which looks and examines Instagram. The ever evolving platforms looks at the fact that there are new platforms being created all the time. Before Instagram, facebook was the leading social media storm and was the number one platform used to connect online. however due to progression and a shift in the way people digest visual media Instagram was born and quickly become one of the highest rating platforms to date. I guess I found the concept of new media very interesting to me as its broader than just looking at a platform on its own or thinking about social media. New Media according to Eugenia Siapera, author of “Understanding New Media”, is a way to study the link in the way technology interacts with society as a whole.

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readings: Siapera, E. 2013, Understanding New Media. SAGE Publications, London (Section: pp.1-16).

Dictionary.cambridge.org. 2018. Cambridge Dictionary | English Dictionary, Translations & Thesaurus. [online] Available at: <https://dictionary.cambridge.org/&gt; [Accessed 29 March 2020].