Rad Readings #1: “Blogs in Media Education”

This week’s reading formed a great foundation for my own personal understanding of why Networked Media and the Media degree in its entirety requires us to maintain a blog for our life as both a student and emerging professional. As discussed in our introductory class this week, our online presence is just as – if not more – important than our physical presence in the media industry. The way by which we represent our livelihoods to the world wide web can be completely controlled by what content we choose to distribute amongst social media platforms – in my case being Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, YouTube, Pintrest and LinkedIn (I’m only a little obsessed). I am very conscious of my varying audiences depending on the platform – for example my Facebook friends include family and people I’ve had more than one face-to-face interaction with, whereas my Twitter followers are limited in people that I have formally met and rather consist of people I share hobbies and passions with – I subconsciously alter the content I publish to suit my fan base friends or followers and the extent to which I allow them to enter my personal life.

I change my ‘voice’.

As Adrian states in the reading, blogs in media education allow students to find their online voice and presence, not only preparing them for professional communications within the media industry, but allowing them to perfect it, creating a consistent online identity (which in my opinion, should match the personality of the person behind the keyboard). This also provides students with time to learn how to separate their personal identity from their public, professional one while maintaining individuality. I know this will be the biggest struggle for me.

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain"

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”

My opinion? I’ve always wanted to blog consistently and this task is just a forced motivation for me to do it. Considering I hope to work professionally in social media in some shape or form, I am more than happy to participate and see this as a very worthy and rewarding task for myself. On the other hand, my fellow classmates who are more into the film production side of media may see it as a big waste of time…

Kerri Gordon

I dig music, social media, celebs and sweet potato fries.

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