Blog Reflection

For my first time creating a blog, I am extremely proud of the finished project. My design is fairly simplistic, but it is one of the strengths of the blog. I chose a uniform layout for each post on top of a background of warm colored water colored art work. I customized the layout to make it as user friendly as possible with a table of contents on the right hand side. A potential revision would be a bigger “about me” section if I decide to keep up my blog. I chose to keep it basic so that it would look more professional for the class. I really am pleased overall with the way it looks and am proud of my first blog whenever I click on the page. It was more difficult than I thought to create the blog, but I actually enjoyed it. Although my posts responding to class readings were mainly oriented towards the actual reading and not my own opinions, I was able to relate to them. In the reading “What we’re doing when we blog” author Meg Hourihan states that you learn about yourself when you blog because you choose how you desire to present yourself. This is very true, and was also a challenge I encountered. I had to find a happy medium between how I wanted to present my feedback on the readings and how much I wanted to talk about my future career. I tried to experiment with embedding videos, creating hyperlinks, and inserting a poll into my blog posts. I created a poll but could not get the HTML code to work unfortunately. If I had three more weeks to work on the blog, I would have continued to try to incorporate a poll into my blog, and make the responses longer. However, the brevity of all of my blogs is also a strength because I won’t lose a reader’s attention with a short and sweet post. The three most important changes I made were the background, the layout, and the making sure the font was uniform. These all added to the aesthetic appeal and were important for the blog to be cohesive and were extremely important because they created more of a theme and expressed my own taste. I am generally a simplistic, easygoing person and my blog shows that. When deciding how much input to give about my future career, I learned exactly how confident I felt about my future career when writing the posts. The fact that digital advertising and media relations are essential to virtually any business, and my career could easily correlate to any of the blog posts reassured me that I chose a major that is relevant and necessary to business. I also learned that I need to focus on specifics while writing .I struggled on finding a balance of how depth I should go for each question. I did learn that I have an eye for balance as my blog layout is cohesive and the images are all sized to be similar. If I had to grade my blog I would give myself an A. My posts are brief but to the point, my design and overall theme give a glimpse of myself, and I certainly utilized various forms of media with the inclusion of videos, images, hyperlinks, and digital design. 

Everything Old Becoming New- Grohol

Ironically, Grohol  chose to criticize an author our class has read before, Meg Hourihan. He disagrees with her “tunnel vision” and close-minded opinion of blogs.  Grohol regards blogs as a necessary part of the internet and hopes they become mainstream rather than viewed as an annoyance. The numbers make it clear that blogs are mainstream with the top popular blog, Huffington Post, receiving a whopping fifty four million visits per month. They are a business tool just as much as a social outlet. Many businesses incorporate blogs as marketing tools to alert the public about their progress. The title of the blog is very fitting to my future career. Technology is more popular and utilized more frequently than ever. A quote that stuck out to me was "everything unique is something old repositioned" because creativity is not truly unique, it is borrowed. Inspiration must come from somewhere and build off of something that already exists. 

Weblogs: A History & Perspective - Bloods

The idea of blogging originated in the 1990’s and has grown since. There are hundreds of blogging platforms in existence, and most are free. The options are endless to customize and share blogs, or keep them private like a diary. In the article “Weblogs: a history and perspective” Rebecca Blood examines the idea of self-actualization through blogging. She has a point considering your blog is a representation of yourself just as much as it showcases your writing. This same idea is important in advertising. The point of an ad is to create a certain appealing image that will encourage others to want a product or service. Blogs can be utilized to do just that, and are considered a PR tool, necessary for advertising.

What we're doing when we blog- Hourihan

Author of "What we're doing when we blog" Meg Hourihan gives her opinion of blogging without bashing it in an obnoxious way. Many people are quick to criticize blogging, but Hourian recognizes that blogs are as unique as the people who write them. One thing all blogs do have in common though is the format. Hourhian makes a valid point that whether you are blogging about other blogs with negative comments, or simply blogging about our personal life, you are still using the same format and encounter the same options of sharing. Although blogs were originally started as an online diary, they are now a business tool. For example, a celebrity blog could easily endorse any product, creating free advertising. Many celebrities are given free products in order to be seen with them or discuss them to gain exposure. 

Blogging can be used in a matter of ways, and as Hourihan puts it, "As with free speech itself, what we say isn't as important as the system that enables us to say it." 

How Youtube Matters- Burgess

The article by Burgess, "How Youtube Matters" is quite intriguing to ponder. How did society share and watch videos before Youtube launched? I certainly can't recall. I also blame Youtube for apps that incorporated video sharing. Vine, a 16 second maximum video sharing application, and Instagram videos, 30 second maximum videos on a picture sharing app, probably would not have existed if the video sharing interface had not become so popular. It is now an overwhelming website with over 100 hours of video uploaded every MINUTE.  Youtube is not only widely used, but can be turned into profit with over a thousand Youtube channels making six figures a year via digital advertising, my future career.

Pencils to Pixels- Barrons

When was the last time you composed writing with simply a pencil and paper? Chances are that it has been a while with all of the digital technologies we are constantly exposed to. A quintessential example of pencils to pixels is the website “Gutenberg Project”. This website converts classical works of literature such as “Alice in Wonderland” into free, online PDFs. This advancement of digitalizing everything goes hand in hand with society’s participatory culture. This culture allows us to share many forms of media rapidly, and share our thoughts on them. 

Below is a link to the Gutenberg Project where you can access over 42,000 free ebooks:
Click here for free e-books!

The Psychology of Blogs- Grohol

Published in 2002, Grohol expresses the lost art of blogging. I found it ironic that eleven years ago he felt that blogging was less personal becoming increasingly mainstream. Since this article, blogging has just become more popular. He also examines the brevity of blogs, and criticizes them for not being well written. I disagree with Grohol’s opinion that short blogs aren’t effective because I believe our impatient society doesn’t desire to take the time to read a longer article. In my future career in marketing and sales, I will be required to compose concise and effective sales pitches, supporting the idea of brevity in writing.

Why Heather Can Write - Jenkins

Jenkins explores the connection between media literacy and Harry Potter in his piece "Why Heather can write." He delves into the media convergence; the combining of old and new media technologies. He also explores an issue of fictional writing, in this case the Harry Potter series, and fans utilizing technology. The series of novels that broke records for the greatest number of books sold on a first weekend after publication had quite the fan base. These fans caused a series of trouble however, when fictional writing met digital technology. Fans began to write "fan fiction" blogs, taking Harry Potter JK Rowling's wildly popular books and writing their own spin offs. They then published their spin offs all over the internet and created new characters to the book. Unfortunately, this ended in copyright infringement accusals and deletion of fan fiction blogs. Media convergence is a part of our daily society with the integration of media technology. Just as old photographs and articles become digitalized, old careers are replaced with new IT and media based careers. I too will one day replace businessman that are foreign to social media and all things technology.

Fan fiction Harry Potter characters:

Blogging as a Social Action: Analysis of the Blog by Miller and Shepherd

“The diary raises the question about audience that has intrigued us from the beginning. Is the diary a personal or a public genre?

This reinforces the notion of our society’s constant need for attention. The social media takeover our generation is experiencing is real. In fact, a huge part of my future career relies on social media. Whether it is promoting a new product, making connections via LinkedIn or facebook, or arranging meetings, social media is necessary for my success.

This piece focuses more on why people blog, and complications that can occur from it. I blame our society's lack of silence for any miscommunication or privacy issues associated with blogging. We live in a society where it is easier to find ways not to be silent than it is to be silent. We post pictures and statuses on various media outlets all in hopes of attention and recognition. The same goes for a blog of those that choose to make it public. 

Bit mapping

Interface simply means the process of two computers interacting. On a day to day basis we are interacting with others via technology. My future career needs interface to exist. The speed we share information is at an all time high, and just becoming more and more a part of the status quo. Johnson talks of the “increasingly naturalized role of the media in contemporary life”, referring to our generations dependence on social media and technology. There is a downside however, as Johnson says “There is no such thing as digital information without filters.” For example, if a celebrity or public figure does something notoriously newsworthy, it will go viral within minutes. Also the saying of “don’t do anything you want on the internet for eternity”, holds true. There truly is no filter with our capabilities.


Click here to see a list of 10 things you SHOULDN'T post on social media

Perfect Transmissions

“Culture can no longer be understood as separate from technology” begins the piece Mark Poster, author of “Perfect Transmissions: Evil Bert Laden”  gives an analysis on the appearance of a beloved Sesame Street character, Bert, on a Bangladesh protest with Bin Laden.

       Protesters quickly misinterpreted the poster as it rapidly went viral across the internet. We are so ridiculously obsessed and reliant on technology these days that teachers warn their students not to post anything on the internet because it is permanent. Poster makes a point as he says culture is not separate from technology due to the digital revolution we are living in. We are all influenced by many other cultures, and they are all becoming a melting pot. It is ironic that an American, like myself, would view the poster as merely odd or a poor attempt at a practical joke, but it could cause great offense in other countries. Poster supports his claim by including his thoughts, “we must begin to interpret culture as multiple cacophonies of inscribed meanings as each cultural object moves across cultural differences.”

Jenkins Response

       Jenkins “introduction” introduces the three key terms of media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence. As an inspiring digital advertising and marketing professional, these three keywords make up the essence of my future career. The 21^st century has been a digital revolution, slowly but steadily incorporating technology into all aspects of the business world.

      The concept of participatory culture is extremely applicable to my future career as social media is a huge requirement. Our culture runs on social media and Internet access as we all contribute to acquire and share news more quickly. This goes along with the Jenkin’s key term “collective intelligence”, the process of many people contributing their knowledge to form a bigger, improved idea. Any career utilizes collaboration to brainstorm new epiphanies and observations. The last keyword Jenkins discusses is media convergence. This describes the flow of media, and will be a huge component of my desired future career. As a marketing and digital advertising intern, I am constantly using varied forms of social media and information technology to achieve goals.