aliceredmondwrites

Assessment 2 Reflection Post

As an incredibly active user of various social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter being the more frequently visited, thinking more deeply about ‘online communities’ has significantly changed my perception of these platforms and the way I interact with them. “Web 2.0 comprises social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, in which hundred of millions of participants do contribute, often on a daily or hourly basis,” (Bolter, 2012, p.202). When you approach the concept at its simplest form, we are really one enormous community whom have the power to comment, share, like, or simply sit back and spectate the infinite topics be interacted with each second.

Jay Oatway (2012) speaks about social media being a fast-paced cultural phenomenon that is constantly subject to change and relies on the notion of community to stay alive. “In order to get noticed by our community, we need to go seek out the places where they are already hanging out,” (Oatway, 2012, p.98). I wanted to explore a digital community that I haven’t had much interaction with. Pinterest is a blogging platform that I have only become familiar with recently, however in the short time I’ve been interacting with it, I have definitely developed a strong liking to it for various reasons. First of all, this is quite a similar experience to that of Instagram, as it is mainly focused on images and creating or interacting with ‘community boards’ – as elaborated in this blog post.

An online article written by Vincent Ng captured the way I view Pinterest perfectly, “It’s not a network trying to engage users with typing (like Twitter and Facebook), instead they are encourage users to tell parts of their lives through visual sharing,” (2013). This is what I love about the blogging forum, as an individual, you have the ability to see things and places all over the world through another person’s eyes and experiences, along with being able to create and share your own stories. As I am not a frequent user of the site, I thought it would be interesting to interact with this community and share my travel experiences which I did by creating my own travel ‘board’ and uploading images I have taken on my trips around Europe.

Across the weeks, my experiences and interaction with Pinterest (see this blog) were really exciting and I learned a lot about what it truly feels like to be apart of an online community. There are many different ways you are able to encourage more interaction with other’s who are also apart of the community and gain more attention which I learnt and will be able to use in the future with my account now. Being able to add comments on other’s posts, gain replies, and also have people from all over the world pin, like, and comment on your posts is such an exciting feeling! To know that there is someone who you most likely will never cross paths with face-to-face, but rather their ‘online identity’, exemplifies the way in which our lives are becoming more and more shaped by the fast-paced world of social media.

“Once you’ve got your storytelling performance up and running, you won’t want to be standing in an empty field,” (Oatway, 2012, p.98). Reflecting on the past few weeks, the way I resonate with these words has now completely changed from the beginning to now. Online communities have revolutionised the way in which individual’s can interact with one another, and allows anyone, from anywhere, at any time, contribute to something they are passionate about to enhance and enlighten others in their community.

References

Bolter, J 2012 “Social Media and the Future of Political Narrative” in Herzogenrath, B, Travels in Intermediality, Lebanon, US: Dartmouth, pp. 206-226

Ng, V 2013,”8 Steps to Growing Your Pinterest Community Board”, MCNG Marketing, <http://www.mcngmarketing.com/8-steps-to-grow-your-pinterest-community-board/#.Vy6NuceZNEc>

Oatway, J 2012, “Mastering Story, Community and Influence : How to Use Social Media to Become a Socialeader Wiley”, Hoboken. pp. 97-109.

Pinterest as an ‘online community’

This week was all about becoming involved with Pinterest and actually beginning to make interactions with it. Pinterest’s main element is its ‘community boards’. These are boards where you can go to depending on your interests or what kind of content you are exploring for, that have had many contributor’s to one board who also have the right to allow others to contribute also if they are apart of that community. For example, there are thousands and thousands of boards surrounding travel, whether its a board on a country specifically that others can add their experiences to or maybe just travel destinations in general as a whole that once again anyone with similar experiences can share. The main objective of these boards is to have people from all over the world contribute where they are able and thus immediately become apart of this ‘online community’.

I have been spending a lot of time pinning other people’s photos I am interested in which then adds those photos directly to my liked pins and allows me to go back to them at any time with a simple click. I also began making comments on others photos and basically just going on an endless clicking adventure from one photo to the other – there really is no end.

As I was doing this I immediately thought about psychologist Mihalyi Csiksgentmihalyi’s introduction of the term “flow”. “Catharsis depends on the viewer’s strong emotional identification in a story’s character and its movement towards completion, flow involves a forgetting of identity” (2011, p.211). Flow never wants to end according to Csiksgentmihalyi, and this idea emanated through my experience online with Pinterest, as there was a constant flow of imagery and text that directly related to the travel community on this forum that I became involved with.

Following this I then uploaded my own travel images to Pinterest and created my own travel board. I started tagging things to have the images be interacted with. Immediately the tags placed the images in certain categories and allows other users to locate the images just by typing ‘travel’ for example.

In the aforementioned article by Vincent Ng, he gave an 8 step guide as to how to grow your community board.

Create Your Board as if it was an Individual Board to Start
Invite Pinners and Influencers to Join the Community Board
Engage with Your Community
Properly Name Your Community Board
Make it Easy for People to Contact You
You can Only Invite Pinterest Users you Follow
Hang in there, and Keep Looking for like Minded People
Promote on Other Social Media

As a first time Pinterest user – these tips were a great help to even just gain insight as to how your boards can become more likely to be interacted with. Over the weeks alongside building up my own boards (I now have boards on interior design and art), I have been continuously liking and commenting on others work. This has immediately given me a sense of community. I love to go check each day on new photos that may have been uploaded to boards that I’m interested in, and just to explore in general.

What is an ‘online community’?

The past week I have been heavily reflecting on what exactly it is that makes a social media platform classified as an ‘online community’. It goes far beyond being an individual and signing up for an account. An online community is created as a result of various factors – interaction alone being at the core. In Jay Otway’s reading (2012), he speaks about social media being a fast-paced cultural phenomenon that is constantly subject to change and relies on the notion of community to stay alive.

When I type into good ‘What is an online community?’, I straight away received an answer written by Common Craft in 2003, which states, “An online community is a group of people with common interests who use the Internet to communicate, work together and pursue their interests over time.” On another site, Deborah Ng spoke about the idea that individuals tend to utilise online communities as they find themselves more likely to find someone who “get it”, in reference to perspectives on certain topics or ideas. I can easily resonate with these authors ideas as I start to think about my own personal experiences with interacting with social media platforms, and on many occasions I resort to them at times as I feel I might be more likely to be understood by a stranger than my own family in various circumstances. Along with this, it is a way for me to be creative and share what I’m passionate about to those who feel the same. It’s quite a liberating feeling to be able to do the aforementioned, especially maybe if you struggle to express yourself outside the digital world.

In class last week we were told to brainstorm various social media platforms we believed to encapsulate the idea of being an ‘online community’. Immediately the ones that popped up in my head included:

The list could go on forever… Pinterest is a platform I have only recently become familiar with and one that I want to explore more and interact with – as a result of this, I have chosen it to be my online community that I wish to become involved with. Particularly due to the enormous amount of images I have captured from all around the world that can be seen in my (link) travel blog, Pinterest seems like the perfect place for me to step my foot in.

Assessment Task One: Blogging

“Network literacy is, in a nutshell, being able to participate as a peer within the emerging knowledge networks that are now the product of the Internet, and to have as ‘deep’ an understanding of the logics or protocols of these networks as we do of print.” (Miles, 2006:203) This quote over the course thus far seems to resonate with me more and more each week whilst learning and building my blog. The importance of digital media today is growing and a vast pace and I believe it to be crucial to understand by anyone living in today’s new media centred context.

My WordPress blog aliceredmondwrites is my very first. Apart from Instagram as a blog form, I have never created anything quite like this, and it thus far has been a massive learning and rewarding experience. Thankfully for Adrian Miles article (2006) explored in the first week, the initial key factors to creating the blog were explained and some unfamiliar terms were explained.

Copyright is an essential factor at the outset of a new blog. Blogs are all about creating links to other texts and being overall an interactive platform for infinite audiences. It is essential that when publishing someone else’s work on your blog there has been written permission provided and that the work is licensed under Creative Commons. In the side bar of my blog my creative commons license can be located. This for me is quite exciting as as you can see in my travel blog posts, all the images were taken and edited myself.

“We must write with awareness that we are writing in the presence of other texts” (Landows,2006, p.77). Since learning more explicitly about hyper-texts, I have become far more aware of the way in which blogging platforms are so easily able to tell a story and lead you to the unknown in an incredible small space of time. In class we spent some time exploring various hyper-texts and analysing the way we individually interacted with them. We also were presented with the task to find a few different stories on blogging platforms, and see where we end up after a few minutes on each page. You will see here that some incredible marketing and product placement skills had me engrossed and ready to spend money on the first blog I explored.

An insight I found quite powerful in week four’s lecture was the idea of intertextuality, and how heavily prevalent it is across network literacy platforms. Intertextuality throughout my blogs just came naturally, I didn’t force it to be a running theme, however as I was constantly linking to other texts and referencing to a plethora of work, you can now go on an endless web-browsing adventure by the continuous ‘click’ of the links incorporated. For example, if you click on the image of the ramen in my first travel blog here, it will directly take you straight to the website of the restaurant in which I visited. In this instance, I have essentially given free advertising and exposure to a business purely because I enjoyed my experience there. I honestly think this is one of the most incredible parts of blogging, for me (as I’m not being paid to advertise on my page) – it is just real, honest recommendations and information.

Bibliography

Landow, George P 2006, Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalisation, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, Print. 69-71, 77-85.

Miles, Adrian 2006, Blogs in Media Education: A Beginning, Screen Education, No. 43, pp. 66-69, Availability: <http://search.informit.com.au.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/documentSummary;dn=374037672250272;res=IELAPA> ISSN: 1449-857X.

First stop – London.

London.

The first images that come to mind as soon as I hear the word are of cups of tea, the Union Jack, the underground sign on every corner, winter, fashion, people… people everywhere. As much as I try to stop falling in love with this city more each time I visit in hope to refrain myself from packing up and leaving everything – it’s seeming to become more and more difficult to do so. The most recent time I had the opportunity to immerse myself yet again in the creative and fast-paced hub that is London, I was able to explore it with a local resident, who opened my eyes up to even more this place had to offer (all though I didn’t think possible). I think it’s always important to see a city in a different way to the stereotypical tourist, and my dear friend Anni provided me with that.

So, here are Alice’s 10 things the not-so-stereotypical London tourist must do!

Brick Lane Vintage Market.I love vintage shopping, and little did I know that I was located just a ten minute walk from one London’s world reknowned vintage hub’s – Brick Lane Markets. If you are into the most treasurable (and affordable) vintage steals, make sure you find yourself roaming the cultural hub that is Brick Lane.
Eat Ramen at Shoryu Carnaby Street.
I have definitely consumed my fair share of Ramen in my time, after all, Japanese is my favourite cuisine and I tend to end up in a Japanese restaurant even if it’s on the complete opposite side of the world to Japan itself ( I think it’s amazing how versatile and open the world we live in is).

However…

Below you will lay your eyes upon the most incredibly delicious and heart-warming Ramen dish that there ever was. Shoryu is located in Carnaby Street at the centre of the city – don’t hesitate, click the image and be on your way.
Go to a festival.
It really doesn’t matter which one, London (and the UK in general) is the host of hundreds of music, art and food festivals pretty much every weekend! I was lucky enough to go to Lovebox which was one of the highlights of my visit.
Open your eyes to the art.
Does there need to be an explanation?

Go explore, wander, get lost in the streets. There is art surrounding you everywhere corner you turn so really there is no excuse not to immerse yourself and enjoy it. The beauty does not cease.
Stop for a shopping break at Shake Shack
My mouth waters just at the thought. If only we had Shake Shack in Australia, my heart would be whole.
Invest in souvenirs… but the right ones
It’s London! There are souvenir’s everywhere! Head to Piccadilly Circus and find some funny little take home gems at some of the markets around. Try to push past the millions of different One Direction key rings and prints (unless you are a die-hard fan as the rest of the country is).
Ride the underground with no intention.
One of my favourite days was my friend Anni and I jumping on the under and overground to take us to – nowhere. We wanted to explore, and having the best public transport system made it so easy to do so. I love getting lost and ending up in the craziest places you may never have seen before otherwise.
Crumbs & Doilies…Cupcake heaven.
Click on the photo to find the location. You can’t go past this place especially if you have a sweet tooth like me. Heaven.
Borough Market!
I had to add an exclamation mark to the title because if there is one place which deserves it – it’s this. I am obsessed with food, especially market food. And this market has it all. From endless massive wheels of cheese, to litres of freshly made sangria to slurp along the journey inside this magical arena, I would never look past venturing here to spend a whole Saturday getting lost and eating way too much food.

Getting to Know Hyper-texts

In class today we were given the task to find 2-3 ‘stories’, articles, or posts online about our area of interest that have an interactive element. The first page I chose to go on was one of my favourite fashion and travel blogger Rumi Neely, whose online blog is Fashiontoast. As soon as I entered the page I am introduced to a plethora of images that are organised in a way to make the page seem immediately clean, crisp, and easy to navigate. As I waver my mouse over the images they become highlighted to almost entice you to click and see what happens next – so I did. I clicked on an image of a YSL handbag sitting on a table, in what looks like a cocktail bar with the view of the most amazing city skyline at night.

I click and end up on blog post ‘the ft LA city guide’. I’m intrigued by images that are accompanied with elaborate text as to Rumi’s experiences of her favourite spots in LA. Somehow, after minutes of reading I have ended up on Rumi’s fashion line Are You Am I online shop, now even more enticed to add everything in my cart and spend money on her products. This to me immediately is an example of the amazing way in which utilising a hypertext and being interactive can lead to endless opportunities for individuals or organisations trying to get ideas or products out there.

The next post I found myself looking at was on my Instagram account. I follow mostly fashion, lifestyle and travel pages so I as soon as my feed was loaded an image of the Louvre in Paris popped up. I clicked on the person who was tagged who took the image and found myself next on his page, scrolling through the most incredible images of different sites around Europe he has visited and photographed. I was found myself stuck here for a few minutes, engrossed in each image along the way, until I was tempted to click on the location in one of his posts of just ‘Paris, France’. This immediately brought up a large map, pinpointing Paris’ location, and below, showing the top posts and then most recent posts of people posting in Paris too. Here, again, I find myself lost in the infinite Instagram ‘scroll’, which is actually although time consuming (without realising) – so incredibly interesting that at the click of a button you can end up looking at posts from thousands to millions of people posting images probably in an extremely close proximity to one another without realising but allowing me, or anyone to be involved with these texts second hand.

Learning and Adding

“Network literacy is being able to participate as a peer within the emerging knowledge networks that are now the product of the internet, and to have as ‘deep’ an understanding of the logics or protocols of these networks as we do of print,” (Miles, 2007).

Adrian’s reading is interesting for me as he brings about various ideas to me that are completely foreign and interesting in terms of learning about why network literacy is so important today and essentially what is the best way to try to understand how it best works. I’ve added to my blog! Which is again cool as the elements in which are now present on it I haven’t really been familiar with at all. I now have a blogroll, which are basically links to other blogs I am interested in and also some of other students in class.The fact we can link to other people’s work that may resonate with ours its quite a crucial part of blogging itself. It creates a whole other sphere or interaction with the click of a button. I’ve also added my social media icons that when clicked on immediately open up that social media platform so viewers can interact with that too. All of these links that are available as I’ve aforementioned allow the blog viewers to be interactive and be lead to a plethora of different online texts and end up maybe somewhere they had no anticipation of being. That to me is pretty cool.

The Beginning!

In terms of creating and running a consistent blog, Instagram is really the only platform in which I utilise to express an online identity available to access by pretty much anyone. Instagram however differs from that of an online blog as it is much simpler and little thought goes into the creating of a picture post really – which thus excited me to be creating my very first online blog. As I progress through my Public Relations degree, I am constantly being educated and faced with the fact that digital media has and continues to be the fundamental factor in evolving the way in which we are consuming information and is crucial to keep up to date with its rapid rate of change. People today are able to express themselves and create and publish information across a plethora of platforms all thanks to what I will name the ‘revolutionary online movement’. Media industries are faced with the constant challenge to keep with the unknown of what digital media has in store next, which is why it is such a crucial industry in today’s modern context.

As I am completely unfamiliar with creating an online blog, Adrian Miles (2006) reading from this week opened my eyes up to the foundations and crucial factors to understand at the inception of a blog. He goes through why blogs are important in Media Education and how they are able to create and online identity and voice for anyone. In the first workshop, going through the basic seemed quite daunting but by the end of it I was overly impressed and excited especially that I had actually managed to get the basics and checklist well underway with little to no problems. I am looking forward to seeing how my skills develop over the duration of the course and what kind of voice I will have adopted also.