Global Social Media

Instagram – selective self or authentic?

The social media platform that I use the most to present a sense of self is Instagram, I’m unsure of why this is but I think its because it’s most used within my social circle and easy to access and use. I haven’t thought of the persona I express on the platform until now, but I believe that everyone expresses a selective or curated self as no matter how ‘authentic’ you are on social media, there is always something you don’t share. Whether that is a creative side, work life, personal life or feelings within themselves and even if you share most of these things, there is always something you won’t share. I think there is a line for everyone and therefore it is mostly a selective self we choose to share.

“Selfies are intended to be an ephemeral and creative form of “live communication”…” (Meese, J et al. 2015), I believe this extends beyond selfies to all pictures posted on Instagram. Personally, I post on Instagram to capture and be present through live communicating with friends, family, etc.

I am trying to make my Instagram a more creative space, whilst still sharing pictures of friends and family. I want to work on aesthetics and colour schemes as this could be useful practice for work with future brands or individuals, so this could allow me to present a personal and professional self. “The intensive use of photography has transformed this art form from the remit of professionals into a tool that anyone can wield immediately…” (Gil, 2019) this demonstrates that Instagram allows anyone to express themselves and be creative, as a form of art.

Photo by Daria Shevtsova on Pexels.com

Affordances

The platform allows for many creative outlets and personal sharing through sharing photos, messages, likes, comments, shares, stories and recently, reels. This enables me personally to express many aspects of myself. Instagram allows someone to see a quick snapshot of your life through an array of pictures, it also allows to create an aesthetic that is seen on your ‘feed’ or at a glance. Whereas, if you compare this to Facebook or Twitter, you have to scroll through individual posts to see them all, where Instagram differs where you can see all pictures without having to scroll through each one. I believe Instagram to be a bit more of a fun space than Facebook, but it can also be professional, as many brands market through Instagram. Therefore, Instagram can be appealing to many.

Intended audience

My intended audience for my social media presence is just friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances, whereas my Digital Artefact is a more targeted audience. However both intended audiences are mostly anyone with shared affinities within my hometown and domestically however, Instagram allows for international access as well.

References:

Meese, J, Gibbs, M, Carter, M, Arnold, M, Nansen, B, Kohn, T, 2015, ‘Selfies at Funerals: Mourning and Presencing on Social Media Platforms‘

Gil, T, 2019 ‘Meaningful Learning through Art: Nature Photography, Haiku Writing, Mobile Technologies and Social Media as a Path to Oneself’

The Chronic Task of Sorting

My remediation this week is based on the liquid life concept that knowledge and information have become the primary form of capital where organisation work models are optimised for efficient information flows. “No one is ‘outside’ anymore, whether by choice or necessity. This also means that the precarity of contemporary life through media extends to each and everyone of us” – Mark Deuze. This quote extends to the concept of my remediation that ‘we are all now switchboard operators’, where we are engaging in routing information around the internet without consciously doing so. This related to the concept of the ‘Chronic Task of Sorting’, termed by Melissa Gregg through using the OODA loop to ‘sort’ information.

This has influenced the distributed network (liquid life) where society has followed and workplaces have changed as a result. The future of organisations and works are free of borders, and homogenise space and time. “With the slow demise of lifelong full-time employment, continuous searching for jobs, preparing for potential future jobs, as well as managing multiple careers more or less simultaneously have become core elements of everyday lifestyle for many.” – Mark Deuze

BCM114 DA Pitch

My DA is based on encouraging people who may be intimidated by healthy eating, to find healthy recipes that they can enjoy without feeling overwhelmed, as they might with other ‘health’ accounts who are usually run by ‘experts’ or people who have experience in the field of fitness or nutrition.

Audience starter pack

My project fits with the FIST principle as it is fast and inexpensive to capture foods that I already buy and make, simple to take photos and write a recipe, and tiny as I’m using an iPhone and simple edits and posting to Instagram.

Re-makes from followers

Its is relevant to users to try our healthy recipes to allow themselves to learn and cook healthy foods, share their re-makes and suggest their own recipes for us to share. It is relevant to me because I enjoy experimenting with cooking. I would like to use this page to further my experience with social media and showcase this experience to a future employer.

Civilisation of the mind: understanding the network society paradigm

The network society today:

• Social structure made of information networks
• A global bio-electronic environment
• Central resource is actionable knowledge
• Binary logic of inclusion/exclusion
• Strategic space is people’s minds

My remediation this week is based on the weaponisation of empathy through propaganda. This relates to the real time coordination and control element of the new network society. Governments and organisations are able to coordinate, in real time, through distance, targeted messages to the public which then influence minds and control actions.

This may also relate to the ‘social structure being made of information networks’, as people are now heavily reliant on getting their news and information from social media, which then means important messaging from governments follows suit. This remediation is based on the coordination and control of weaponising of empathy to strategically play on people’s emotions through expressing vulnerabilities (such as older people and babies in the pandemic). For my remediation, I played on the essential health workers vulnerabilities to display what may be to come from government messaging when a vaccine is widely available in Australia.

DA Pitch- BCM206

My project is relevant to users and ourselves as we create and share recipes that we have tried and love, without compromising flavour to be ‘healthy’.

• It helps to locate healthy recipes that taste good
• It provides an easy option to locate simple, tasty and healthy recipes
• Takes the dread out of healthy cooking

It has been relevant for us, as a group, because we would send recipes to each other that we wanted to try but they would get lost amongst other conversations. We wanted to provide a space that was unbiased from food influencers pushing their own products in their recipes and we thought what better way to make a page and share the recipes we love with others like us.

Our followers have tried our recipes and we have received really good feedback both in person, and through our page.

This page will fit my portfolio and future career by showcasing my experience with social media as well as what I can do for other brands, businesses, or individuals. It will showcase my creative side as well as provide an insight into my interests and who I am as a future employee.

Global News

Citizen Journalism in India

Citizen journalism is a concept that is widely debated across the world. Citizen journalism is the act of ordinary citizens recording, documenting and reporting on issues and news throughout their region and the world through social media. It is argued that this practice obscures truth of actual events and can harm the accuracy of reporting and therefore diminish trust in mainstream media. On the other hand, citizen journalism can reveal truths that mainstream media can’t or won’t cover and reveal issues not normally seen in mainstream media.

I believe that citizen journalism through social media can be both beneficial and harmful to informing the public. The beneficial side is that we are now exposed to a vast array of news and are aware of many issues across the globe “as specific stories happen to or near users who are able to cover them first hand, or as such stories attract the attention of a number of participants sizeable enough to make existing reports more widely visible through sharing and commenting activities” (Bruns, A & Highfield, T, 2012). For example, “Citizen journalism in India has had an impact mainly in situations of crisis (tsunami, earthquake, rains, terrorist attacks), but it is also increasingly influencing politics by exposing corruption and highlighting social issues such as the sexual harassment of women and the life situations of minorities like gender, religion, caste, ethnicity (Sonwalkar, 2009)” (Pain, P 2018) However, this can also be hindered by the strength of our attention economy in this online world in which we live today, by dismissing events and news by the scroll of our screens or not checking sources.

India…

In India, citizen journalism is one the rise, with less people having trust in mainstream media. Around 100 million people in India live in impoverished conditions, and ‘tribals’ have been losing their voice and are not heard in mainstream media (Sharma, C, 2013) Shubhranshu Choudhary, a former BBC journalist and founder of CGnet Swara, says, “There’s not a single tribal journalist… The journalism is completely one-sided. Not only were the tribal people absent as voices in the media — they had no access as consumers either.” (Sharma, C, 2013). This means that citizen journalism is absolutely paramount for the people living in this region to raise awareness and expose truths around issues and news around them that mainstream media doesn’t cover. They are not only misrepresented, but they also have no access to consume news that is and isn’t related to them and their region.

There are many examples of news stories that have surfaced due to citizen journalism in India, including:

• In 2013, in Chhattisgarh, a local farmer made a phone call to CGNet that was progressive of citizen journalism. “Naresh Bunkar… reported an issue of a forestry officer who had extorted a bribe… from the Adivasi tribal community. Soon after his report, an official enquiry was instigated and within a month the official was found guilty and the bribe money was returned.” (Shrivastava, S, 2018)
• In 2018, a “video of a Sikh police officer saving a Muslim man from a possible lynch-mob in Uttarakhand was shared widely on social media.” The video caused a wide-spread awareness to the issue of lynching and also exposed problems going on in this region (Shrivastava, S, 2018)
• In Bhagalpur, Bihar, video was captured by a citizen journalist of “a man accused of snatching a chain who was later brutally beaten and dragged by the mob and then by the police. This footage caught the attention of the nation and built media pressure on the open abuse of human rights which forced the Bihar government to act against the policemen involved.”(Sharma, C, 2013)

Citizen journalism in India, not only through social media, but through the revolutionary CGNet, has been paramount in seeing the rights of less privileged citizens be exposed and brought to attention. It cannot be denied that overall, for India, citizen journalism has made the people more involved in news and issues as well as brought insight into the lives of the population.

References

Bruns, A & Highfield, T, 2012, ‘Blogs, Twitter, and breaking news: The produsage of citizen journalism‘

Pain, P, 2018, Citizen journalism and mainstream media Ear to the ground or useless entities? Citizen journalism and mainstream media in India https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322903935_Ear_to_the_ground_or_useless_entities_Citizen_journalism_and_mainstream_media_in_India

Sharma, C, 2013, How Citizen Journalism Has Been Aiding Tribal India In Ways Like No Other https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2013/05/how-citizen-journalism-has-been-aiding-tribal-india-in-ways-like-no-other/

Shrivastava, S, 2018, How Citizen Journalism Is Proving To Be The Most Powerful Journalism Of Our Time https://chaaipani.com/citizen-journalism-is-proving-to-be-the-most-powerful-journalism-of-our-time/

Global Nervous System

The global nervous system, a system of global networks connecting the world as we know it today, is complex but revolutionary to today’s society.

From this weeks lecture, I took away some valuable learning’s from the history of the global nervous system. Mainly, that today information is decoupled from matter or a physical interaction/material and is able to move through space and time allowing real time coordination and control where all nodes are able to communicate. This was made possible by the invention of the telegraph in the mid-19th century.

My remediation this week is based on the happenings in out tutorial where we coordinated a ‘spam’ on Reddit to gain fake karma for everyone who commented. This demonstrates the concept of real time coordination and control as we were able to coordinate, through space and time (discord), the ‘spam’ of the subreddit and as a result, control the outcome of the ‘karma’ we received.

Ideology & KUWTK/ The Bachelor

https://darichboy.com/2020/03/26/keeping-with-the-kardashians-teaser-released/

Popular Culture is difficult to define. How many people need to consume it to be considered popular? Storey (2015) suggests, among other definitions, that popular culture “simply, culture that is widely favoured or well-liked by many people”.

The most common popular culture I consume is television series, especially those that are ‘reality’ based such as The Bachelor/Bachelorette and Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

Most of us either know of or have binge-watched KUWTK or the Bachelor at some point. They’re easy to follow, filled with drama and humour but they aren’t exactly everyone’s first thought when considering testing ideologies and informing audiences through representation. But you would have to argue that in fact, it is valuable in this way.

Ideology can be defined as “the set of beliefs characteristic of a social group or individual” (Oxford Dictionary online). Ideology is beliefs about the world and society which are influenced by the things around us, such as our upbringing, politics, the media we consume, views on marriage, etc. Storey suggests that our understanding of ‘culture’ is complicated, or sometimes confused by the interchangeable use of the world ‘ideology’ (2015).

KUWTK, although considered ‘feminine’ and ‘low culture’, is a show that has challenged many societal issues such as sexism, racism and transgender rights.

The issue of feminism both on and off the show is quite often sparking debate. “Every time Kim posts a selfie, everyone has an opinion about whether or not she should take it down, or that since she’s a mother, she shouldn’t be posting naked selfies. I think that raises a lot of important questions about feminism and women’s bodies,” (Pruitt 2016, in McLaughlin, 2016)

Transgenderality has been one of the most controversial ideologies tested on the reality tv show as “…the family have given trans rights a visibility that might not have been achieved otherwise,” (Pruitt 2016, in McLaughlin, 2016) This was prominent in Caitlyn Jenner’s transition being at the forefront of discussion on the show during this time.

https://pagesix.com/2016/05/12/will-caitlyn-jenner-go-back-to-life-as-bruce/

The representation of transgender people on KUWTK is also beneficial to audiences and minority groups being shown in the media we consume, without this representation in the media, we are often under the impression that these issues are not prominent or important. In the case of KUWTK, the representation of a transgender person is beneficial for the trans community and society as a whole to understand and be exposed to the issues that are faced by this group. Representation in the media “has a particularly powerful impact on people who have little or no direct contact with members of the groups being treated.” (Cortes, 1987, in Lawson, 2018).

In contrast, the Bachelor and Bachelorette do not reflect society and groups of people in the ‘outside world’. You only have to watch one episode to find this out. The Bachelor or Bachelorette in question white and heterosexual, and the contestants usually reflect the same. In Australia, there has only been one person of colour in the Bachelor position, Blake Garvey in 2014. Occasionally, there has been a few contestants reflecting this minority, however many argue that it is just a sympathy recruitment as the network does not give these people any screen time. This was reflected this year on Bachelor in Paradise with Niranga Amarasinghe, who was sympathised with widely on social media for the lack of screen time he received.

https://www.msn.com/en-au/lifestyle/style/the-best-twitter-reactions-to-the-premiere-of-the-bachelor-australia-2020/ar-BB17RFbh

‘When the only portrayals audiences see of minority characters are negative—those portrayals transcend to public image. … societal groups such as women, gays and the elderly.’ (Cortes, 1987, in Lawson, 2018)

Overall, KUWTK holds some valuable portrayals of societal issues which is debated through their world-wide audience, whereas the Bachelor franchise is reflecting just the opposite.

Who would have thought that KUWTK would hold some valuable lessons and eye-opening ideologies?

References:

Lawson, K, 2018, ‘Why Seeing Yourself Represented on Screen Is So Important’ VICE

McLaughlin, A, 2016, ‘Why Keeping Up Matters: The Kardashians as a Reflection of Society’

Storey, J, 2015, ‘Cultural Theory and Popular Culture’ What is Popular Culture