BCM111 Week 4 Blog Post: A Persona Generated World

For me, Instagram has become one of the most used social media apps in my phone, from taking aesthetically pleasing pictures, creating and designing stories and contacting and stalking friends or crushes. But in my opinion, it has become the number 1 social media app that shows peoples personas or what people want you to see. I primarily use Instagram to post some of my favourite memories or moments of my life and just to show myself authentically but in a cleaned-up sort of way. However, most of the users on Instagram have this persona to them, to create the perfect life to gain followers, brand deals and essentially fame. Instagram users are focusing more on displaying self promotion and their personal identity rather than connecting with people (Alhabash & Ma 2017, p.4)

Instagram is a Photo-sharing app that makes it so easy for people to create a persona online. The app allows us to use affordances such as filters, stories, captions, hashtags and the new update of IGTV to basically create our own story with each and every post (Shane-Simpson et al. 2018, p. 277). ‘The more advanced the technology, on the whole, the more possible it is for a considerable number of human beings to imagine being somebody else’ (Pittman & Reich 2016, p.155). The advances in technology make it easy to be basically somebody else, you could photoshop yourself or anything in your life to create your own persona or to become a completely different person.

For my own Instagram, I only have 1 account which I find pretty rare these days as most people I talk to either have a fan account, business or just another private account, but I take pride that my social media shows my authentic self but just more polished. I am trying to make my social media more fun as Instagram marketing is what I want to do after university, so my biggest asset is showing off my own social media. I do find I put more of my authentic self on Instagram compared to other platforms such as Snapchat or Facebook, as I don’t really use Facebook that much and when I do it most of the time my family tagging me in something so most of the time my online self on Facebook is based off my family or friends not what I put out personally.

I like to think that my audience and the audience for a lot of people is themselves, I post on social media for myself and I post what I want and what my life entails, A social media feed can be seen as someone’s life story and can show as a timeline for people to look back on. My account is private, so not everyone can access my social media very easily but the people that can access it is my friends and family that can look at what I’m up to.

Instagram is an amazing app to share people’s lives on but whether or not that life is real, well I guess we will never know.

References:

Alhabash, S & Ma, Mengyan 2017, ‘A Tale of Four Platforms: Motivations and Uses of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat Among College Students?’, Social Media + Society, vol. 3, iss. 1, pp. 1-13.

Pittman, M & Reich, B 2016, ‘Social media and loneliness: Why an Instagram picture may be worth more than a thousand Twitter words’, Computers in Human Behaviour, vol. 62, pp. 155-167.

Shane-Simpson, C, Manago, A, Gaggi, N & Gillespie-Lynch, K 2018, ‘Why do college students prefer Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram? Site affordances, tensions between privacy and self-expression, and implications for social capital’, Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 86, no. 2018, pp. 276-288.

BCM111 Week 3 Blog Post: Citizen Journalism is it good or bad?

Citizen journalism is a big part of the news and media today, it can be seen as collaborative media with the public as the individuals can collect, analyse and report to post the story on social media or the traditional ways of the news like TV. ‘Citizen journalism’ refers to a range of web-based practices whereby ‘ordinary’ users engage in journalistic practices. Citizen journalism includes practices such as current affairs-based blogging, photo and video sharing, and posting eyewitness commentary on current events.’ (Goode 2009 p.1288).

Citizen journalism can be a good and a bad thing, there can be a lot of misunderstandings, which by the time people realise it’s a misunderstanding it can be too late, the general public can actually believe it which can lead to false information going around, causing the information to be considered unethical or untrustworthy to most of the public. Citizen journalists are also not held at the same level for punishment or ethics compared to actually journalists that are held under the journalist’s code of ethics. However, Citizen Journalism can be positive, with social media being such a big thing today it gives citizen journalists to post and report news stories as they are happening (Wall 2015) for example the murder of George Floyd was filmed on a phone and posted on social media.

Citizen Journalism is a very big part of the media in France, there is a French website called Agorafox which was ‘the first European initiative of citizen journalism’, the site was created in 2005 and was created for users to express themselves freely without any sensors on information (Ali 2018, p.5). The site was evidently based on ‘grassroot journalism’: ‘the idea that news does not come exclusively from the top (the media) but also from readers. Thus, this site has a motto that says, “Every citizen is a Reporter” (Ali 2018, p.5). Over a few years the site grew tremendously by October of 2017 there were 113,988 articles published, 3,319,421 comments posted, 90,467 editors and 3262 moderators on the site (Ali 2018, p.6).

Agorafox website

The site had both advantages and disadvantages as the site filled the gap of stories as the traditional media could not cover every single story and the users of the site can be seen as less biased or censored (Ali 2018, p.8). The disadvantages are the stories can be false or untrustworthy as citizens can make up any story and be able to publish the story or ‘news’ on the Agora fox website which spread mistruths and with the whole point of the website being the ability to have freedom in what the users post, is this website really beneficially to anyone?

Citizen Journalism very much has its Pros and Cons, multiple stories in the world would not be seen if it wasn’t for citizen journalism but it’s hard to sometimes believe if it is true or if it is false.

References:

Ali, W 2018, Citizen Journalism in France: Professional Practice and Self-Regulation, Athens Journal of Mass Media and Communications, vol. X, no. Y, pp. 1-19.

Goode, L 2018, Social News, Citizen Journalism and Democracy, New Media & Society, vol 11, pp. 1287, 1305.

Wall, M 2015, Citizen Journalism, Digital Journalism, vol. 3, no. 6, pp. 797-813.

BCM111 BLOG POST 1

Week 2 Blog Post- ‘What popular culture do you consume?’

When thinking about what popular culture I consume I had to really think about it, as most of the time I usually just watch the same two shows over and over again, but I do go through phases of watching the classic drama filled Reality TV shows like Love Island or Too Hot to Handle like every single 20-year-old girl watches.

So, what is popular culture?

Popular Culture is defined by 6 possible definitions created by John Storey as popular culture is quite difficult to define as everyone has a different interpretation of what popular culture is. Some of the proposed definitions of popular culture are:

1. The culture is ‘leftover’, meaning not high culture. Looking at popular culture as inferior to high culture (Storey 2015)
2. Popular culture as ‘mass culture’- mass produced for mass consumption, for non-discriminating customers’ (Storey 2015)
3. ‘… simply, culture that is widely favoured or well-liked by many people’ (Storey 2015)

But that does make me think why do shows like this become so popular? My Family hates them and wonder why I watch them because in their words ‘ These shows are so stupid’ or ‘Don’t these people have jobs or something ‘ and then I reply by telling them to shut up and for them to just let me live. But I think about why I watch them and that’s because there is no drama in my life, so it spices my life up a little bit and as I have already mentioned I am single, and these shows do have some sort of romance factor.

So how do these juicy and drama-filled TV shows fit into popular culture ?. These types of shows are very popular with Millenials (16-34), looking at an article about the 2019 season of love island UK, the show acquired 5.7 million viewers from that season and that was only in the UK. These statistics were only from 1 season of UK love island, there are multiple other versions of Love Island including Australia, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, USA and more. The other popular reality TV show is Too hot to handle, which takes people from all over the globe and puts them in a resort and recently has released a Brazil version.

Stats of love island target audience

An ideology to consider of why this type of media is so popular is the idea of cultural proximity. ‘Cultural proximity is the intuitively appealing notion that people will gravitate toward media from their own culture…’ (Kziazek & Webster 2008 p.485). From someone that watches the shows in Australia, I have really only watched the UK, US and Australian version and why is that? . A lot of people watch things very similar to their own life, values, beliefs and humour, for example Australia, UK and US all have something in common- we are all English speaking countries with very similar ways of life, we also understand universal references and topics which makes it more easy to consume these types of media. Straubhaar (2003 p. 82) explained ‘… ability to speak or at least understand the language of a broadcast, is an important ingredient in audiences selection of a program and their enjoyment of it’. Most of the time when we don’t understand a show or a character from different nations there is a clear ‘ social distantiction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ ‘(Sūna 2018 p.31), which explains why other versions of love island or other reality shows are less popular.

But I think Love Island will always be popular no matter the country, if you don’t believe me, you just have to watch the juicy drama-filled show for yourself.

References:

Ksiazek, T.B, Webster, J.G 2008, Cultural Proximity and Audience Behaviour: The Role of Language in Patterns of Polarization and Multicultural Fluency, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media vol. 52, iss. 3, pp. 485-503

Storey, J 2015, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, 7th ed., Routledge, New York

Sūna, L 2018, Negotiating Belonging as Cultural Proximity in the Process of Adapting Global Reality TV Formats, Media and Communication, vol. 6, iss. 3, pp. 30-39.