My Dad asked me to watch a video that he had seen on Facebook, saying that I should listen to what it has to say, and other of my age group should too. It was a video about the ‘battle’ between social media and subsequent ‘phone frenzy’ and the authenticity of ‘reality.’ The generational trait of internet ‘savvy-ness’ precedes us as a reputation, and what strikes me as a cornerstone of this reputation is our altered interpretation of language, and how shifted use of it can change the formality and context of conversation to suit an online profile. “Internet Linguistics’, coined by linguist David Crystal, is the examination of how the shift to technology as a form of communication has changes our language. The internet has been blamed for making children illiterate, making adults stupid, and generally tarnishing the condition of modern discourse. Social media communication practices, in actuality, have made it easier to communicate more quickly without altering the rules of language. The backlash from the suggestion that internet language is in fact a serious development confirms that it is a very small and striking written dialect. The characterisation as a deviation from ‘standard’ written language defines it as a dialect – the abbreviation, the shorthand, the use of acronyms, the lack of punctuation, and the focus on simplicity and the lack of formality; all creating unseen subtle nuances in tone and voice, something unable to be discerned from typical written text. Internet language requires imagination and user participation to grow and develop the dialect, and will continue to develop in to a more diverse and complicated language.
I was scrolling through my Instagram after receiving a few unexpected notifications about a few new followers – to my surprise as I have not uploaded a photo in about 3 months, and the likes and comments keep rolling in about some even older photos of mine, I began to consider the value of my content and my place in the ‘community’ of Instagram. The social currency, as coined in Mastering Story, Community and Influence, from what I have perceived, is not always consistent in value. As Oatway establishes, “Obscurity is the enemy”, and goes on to provide an in-depth analysis of the inner workings of the online community and how this interactive constructs the identity and how it then translates into real-life results. It was essentially a paper on how to make Internet friends – a concept that I originally took for granted being raised to be automatically sensitive to the inner workings on online society. But the intricacies of such interaction do require a formula. My Instagram posts are not intended to have a theme or aesthetic – they are simply what is going on in my life that is worth sharing with the world,and perhaps my posts contribute to other’s specific aesthetic styles. As a media student, my online presence has the potential to be a key component of my career, and if I were to create more of an identity for myself, I may see a clear reflection of my efforts, and enjoy the community my participation has influenced.
Oatway, Jay, Apr 26, 2012, Mastering Story, Community and Influence : How to Use Social Media to Become a Socialeader Wiley, Hoboken. 97-109.
Online writing is the expression or discussion of ideas, opinions, experiences in a variety of voices, published in a typically interactive environment that provides access to the content written, and is open to response and further discourse regarding the topics raised and the theme or genre of the blog. Online writing in the form of a blog provides opportunity for the interrogation of ideas and reflection upon personal, professional, or scholarly topics – blogging simply provides a broad platform in which to publish ideas to a diverse audience with great accessibility.
Blogging in an online format is just a progression in technology possibilities, with blogging simply being a new medium in which ideas can be expressed, in the same way that “the book and the essay are the activities that for many of us translate information into knowledge, … as the key ‘forms’ or ‘containers’ for knowledge and its expression.” (Miles, 2007). In my blog posts pertaining to my experience in my studio, I have used blogs to map my learning, progress, and thoughts regarding to the developing ideas surrounding a creative brief. The blogs provides a platform to quickly tap out my thoughts and share them to those that can provide feedback on the fairly experimental brief, with the concept of conversation being the key focus of the posts. Being a relatively young technology in comparison to the traditional methods of sharing information, the blog as a container for information and thoughts allows discussion to flow more effectively, and thus the feedback can be translated more easily into further developed ideas.
The diversity that blogging provides in terms of what can be displayed, for example the post about the key aspects of the brief, as a simple written reflection, and a post that simply provides a visual of our thinking process, are both forms of online writing that would not previously been as accessible 15 years ago, with ‘audio-visual mass media… [providing] a continuous and instantaneous stream of information from an enormous variety of sources.’ (Murphy, Potts, 2003) I find this form of blogging, in which ideas can quickly be posted without to much concern about the intricacies of scholarly writing and formatting can allow the content to shine through as the key focus of the post.
Blogging both for this course and the studio have required different voices and content for what is to be produced – with Networked Media being more of a scholarly response to the content and reading, that requires a response based on the thinking that the subjects incite, where as the studio is more of a personal reflection of my feelings and thoughts as the project comes together. It offers a diverse way of providing information – text, video, sound, visuals – all in one location, that can be changed and designed to my liking with incredible ease. While consistently updating a blog on the same topic over and over again without repeating oneself can be tedious, as I have found in the past with other subjects, the merits of blogging as an online writing form present themselves as a valuable tool to generate discussion and form insightful reflective thinking.
Bibliography:
- Miles, Adrian, Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge [online], Screen Education, No. 45, 2007: p. 26
- Andrew Murphie and John Potts, Culture and Technology [print], New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003: p. 14
- Griffiths, Shannon, s3547183@student.rmit.edu.au, 2016,
Week 3 – Core Points, Blog Post, 9 / 4 / 16, https://shangriffo.wordpress.com/2016/04/09/week-3-core-points/ - Griffiths, Shannon, s3547183@student.rmit.edu.au, 2016, Progression, Blog Post, 11 / 4 / 16, https://shangriffo.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/progression/
The planning for the creative brief in the long-term – we found – would need to be a wide variety of ideas and directions we could go with, but not before every possibility and question was raised, and hopefully answered. We produced a mind map and a profession of how we would need to operate in order to produce the content we wanted, and to be the best it can.