#DIGC101 Reflection Essay
Using and Experiencing the Web as a communication Form
Forms of new media communications and technologies have allowed for advances in various areas of peoples lifestyles today. The ways in which computer mediated communication has developed has allowed for society to create all new types of ways to carry out tasks and form new ideas. Digital Communications: New Media Communications has allowed me to explore new possible was to interact with others over the Internet. The developments in Web 2.0, allowing for new interactions in mediums from Blogs to Social Networking Sites, have opened my eyes up to methodologies and ideas that the web has provide. New understandings and theories coincide with the Internets technological development like anti-teaching and the online ability to manipulate self-presentational media.
The expanding platform of information on the Internet has allowed for people to re-evaluate education. In what was once an area that I foresaw as being strongly dictated by structured textbooks and with a limitation to the accessibility of knowledge, now has a possibly unlimited avenue of information. The Internet has allowed me to access almost whatever I need, whenever I choose to. This has lead to theorist Welsh to establish the ‘Anti-teaching’ method (Welsh, 2007). It looks at educators trying to enforce a more creative and investigative style for their students towards learning. After education had become more about “a meaningless game of grades rather than an important and meaningful exploration of the world in which we live and co-create” (Welsh, 2007). Instead of simply enforcing and pushing information for absorption, applying the possibly better route for students who now have access to information across the world. This easily accessible information being what allows students the room to self discover. I have discovered the abilities and powers of such sites, like Twitter, Wikipedia and Facebook for supplying links and cyber sources, and cell phones and laptops as tools for establishing learning networks.
The study into online presentation has allowed me to look at new forms of interaction and experimental ways of self-presentation. The assessability of the Internet has too ensured that users can combine their collective intelligence to compare and co-produce common knowledge amongst one another. Anyone can potentially adopt a form of performative identity with sites like Youtube. These allow people to explore personas and mask behind characters fictional or real. The Internet can also represent us, with search engines such as Google, allowing information on any person to become quite accessible. What is different to realife is the simulation that the World Wide Web offers, that one can create or show just what they wish to be represented as. My web project explores these boundaries as I created a new persona on the social networking site Myspace. I fixated a pop culture analysis that gives objective views on topics and trends. I had the choice of completely removing my personal details from my persona ‘rubypearl’ and offer no direct links back to myself. I chose to however keep a social link to myself by basing the character on me and using my previous profile account, allowing readers to know the true author of the content.
The Internet has been able to start breaking down physical social interaction between people. Various channels of communication start to take on strongly computer-mediated components. Computer mediated communication has the ability to over come the physical boundary and connect or network people together to interact despite not being in the same physical space (McQail, 2005). My personal need to communicate through voice by technologies such as the phone for example, is often replaced with a computer mediated text message, email or online chat. The evolution of interaction may go as far as adopting layered communications “a mixing of text, speech and video – will become a key issue for online communities in 2010 and beyond” (Rhodes et al, 2009), possibly the next step in technological progression.
Web 2.0 started to revolutionise the Internet as a productive and dominant medium. It is this development of the Internet that allows us users to participate in the “information sharing, interoperability, user-centred design and collaboration” (O’Reilly, 2005) of the web. This allows the freedom for users to combine and access their collective intelligence and participate or contribute the content themselves. Discovering this as a user has allowed me to analysis ways of uploading my own content on the Internet and looking at the potential of the web as a medium for accessing and reaching the audience I want to be viewing my work.
From Web 2.0 came the production of new media forms of communication such as the Blog as its participatory format defining its function. The personal blog I have created as part of these studies on Tumblr relies on my ability as the authors to sustain its content. Instead of a limited audience like an email, my blog on is open to having an almost unlimited reader capacity. The vast number of different blogs available on the Internet however does limit the potential for people to be likely to view my specific content. My intended audience (markers Dr Moore and Dr Wilson) are able to access my posts as a form of electronic diary of class participation and exercises. “Weblogs could potentially offer new perspectives on the relation between the Internet and the expression of identity” (Doorns et al, 2007), allowing me to post the idealistic content to my educators and allowing them as my audience to only see what I choose for them to see.
Blogs have an ability to be manipulated, updated and maintained as the text is being present across a specific view on a subject. The intended audience we create for a blog forum allows and defines what the purpose of the site entails, and the social impact and relationships we wish the reader to undertake (Goffman, 1958). For my web project persona Rubypearl’s blog forum I chose not to situate it within a blog software site purposely. By choosing Myspace as the platform to present off, I have chosen the way in which I want the posts to be perceived. Considering it is a very social, trend and fad dictated forum aimed at more teenaged girls, this coincides with the majority of Myspace users. By using the Myspace medium I have intended for the representation of young hip pop culture to be done on what I personally see as a pop culture driven medium.
Social Networking Sites have had the ability to change the way society defines relationships and ‘friends’ within the online communities they create. Networking sites such as Myspace, Facebook and Twitter are “ transforming long-established patterns of social interaction by making many-to-many communication…for the first time in human history” (Grimes & Warschauer, 2007). The ability to connect with multiple users across a vast array of physical space instantaneously, has allowed for new forms of relationships to develop.
Companies rely on the user participation function of Social Networking Sites to power their existence. When a user creates a profile, their main function is to be connected with and towards others who you wish to view you content “Facebook is 100% about sharing information—that’s pretty much its entire raison d’etre.”(Eaton, 2009). When we upload there is the possibility for the content, or anything on the internet, to be easily manipulated, replicated and distributed in ways beyond what where our original intentions. This has created debate over ownership of Internet content and its privacy. It means that what we place on the Internet we have to know that we are accountable for. In what is still such a new age medium for people, most of society is still learning the etiquette and methods for its usage. Some sites have the solo purpose of sharing and distribution its content. An example of this is Flickr, which relies on any user to submit content and offer the platform for others to view or use the images. If Flickr didn’t have any users participating, the site would not function, as it merely links together peer users.
The Internet is a fast moving media when it comes to its own development and growth. The ways in which we access information as well as the ways in which we interacted with others has already changed because of this medium. This leaves room for the understanding that even these new methods wont be new for much longer, and too will possibly be replaced in the future. My growth over the past four weeks of study have allowed me to discover some of the Internet’s developments, for example that I have discover the existence and the function of the RSS feed for user notification of author updating on selected sites. Also the discovery of various more social networking sites and the possibilities and functions that are available through each one. These new media forms of communication, if not already, will change and revolutionise what we perceive as communicating. No longer are we physically restricted to physical constraints like face to face or technologies that lack mobility.
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