Media can refer to two separate concepts. The first is to the broad term used to cover the multitudes of organisations and institutions that produce forms of media, such as television, print and radio. The second is artefacts or “mediums” that are the byproduct of these institutions. For example, magazines, newspapers, videos, and photographs. According to “New Media: A Critical Analysis”, new media refers to a large prospect of “social, technological and cultural change…as part of a new technoculture”. Online media involves a series of practices that are exclusive to that breed of media, predominantly social media. This new type of media essentially questions what can be done with online media, and how it is incorporated into every day life. Social media is the component that is most predominantly associated with online media, which is distributed through platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter, as well as blogging engines such as Tumblr and WordPress. In order to successfully produce content for these sites, it is important to grasp the concepts of authoring, publishing and distributing online media.
Authoring is associated with writing or creating content, and can be produced by anybody. Specifically in the field of blogging, these online media distribution websites serve the purpose of “[allowing] a record to be maintained of ideas, reflections, activities” (Miles, 2006). Rather than a personal diary or journal, a blog is a public entry posted onto a public domain, and can be viewed by anyone with access to the blog URL. Creating content for a blog entails certain contributing factors that should be noted and guidelines that should be abided by. The first is ethics, whereby the code of conduct for authors outlines values, which is described by Louis A. Day as “a set of principles or a code of moral conduct”. For media practitioners, the term “ethics” is embodied in issues such as plagiarism and attribution, or when their work is unlawfully taken and published by someone else. This culture was most prevalent in my authoring during my seven days of consistent blogging, when I was required to document my use of online media over a week. In order to appropriately disclose a website or practice, it was essential to reference it or instead provide a hyperlink that led directly to the content. I found the MEAA Journalist Code of Ethics, as well as the Creative Commons Attribution Fact Sheet to be particularly useful, as it outlines what should be stated and why it should be stated. Additionally, an issue that was encountered was the repetitiveness and tediousness of explaining what online media was produced each day, and why it was produced. These questions were often difficult to answer, as producing content had become an automatic process that I engaged with every day as a means of self-expression. In my past experiences with blogging via Tumblr, I was projecting a highly personal reflection of myself onto my blog, and in doing so, I would only update when I felt it necessary. According to Susannah Stern from the University of San Diego, adolescents are constantly “trying to understand themselves and their role in a greater society (who am I?), [and we] frequently look to their social world for cues about what principles and traits to internalise”, hence the reason why we look to blogging as a means of “venting” and expressing oneself.
In blogging, publishing is related to the actual process of posting on online media platforms. The questions that were raised in the publishing sector of the consistent blogging task included why I favoured certain platforms over others, and what kind of content I chose to post on certain days. From a personal standpoint and as a relatively private person, the more control I had over the viewers of my content, the more likely I was to publish on that platform. For example, I found that I was favouring Instagram due to the fact that I could dominate who followed me and concurrently, was able to view and engage with the images and videos that I posted. In comparison to a platform like Facebook, where I have hundreds of “Friends”, of whom I only actively am friends with a handful, Instagram is more controlled and I am able to be significantly more selective. Another interesting insight enquired was whether the quality of a conversation reduced as the number of platforms that it took place on increased. I found that the more content I published and interacted with, the less meaningful the engagements became. This was characterised in a 2003 study by Yahoo! and Carat Interactive as “media multitasking”, which can be defined as “(using various media simultaneously), [which] is the Millennial’s specialty, and the growth in the amount of media being used by young people is largely explained by their multitasking behaviour…the [internet plays a central role in their multitasking”. This tendency to multitask and interact with various platforms at the same time was, retrospectively, an efficient way to communicate with several people at once, however the quality of the content that I was publishing suffered due to being so preoccupied simultaneously producing content on several other platforms.
The final aspect of blogging is distribution, which involves dispensing the content amongst several platforms. This is made simple within applications such as Instagram, which provides an option for users prior to posting their image or video, to simultaneously post to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Swarm, which you can link to your Instagram account. This maximises the degree of exposure that the post receives. An issue that I encountered at the distribution stage was my lack of desire to share my posts on all platforms. Due to my tendency to be relatively introverted and withdrawn person on social media, I didn’t feel an urgency to distribute my work amongst other sites. I was presented with the internal argument about why I went through certain documentation processes in order to distribute the content that I created. I had to consider why I took images predominantly on my iPhone, and why I gravitated towards posting images rather than text. The most basic answer to my questions were the elements of convenience associated with these online media practices. It seemed the most logical to stay connected by using the catalyst that I carried in my pocket and held in the palm of my hand: my phone. According to a study conducted in 2010 by the Pew Research Centre in Washington D.C., “three-quarters (75%) of teens and 93% of adults ages 18-29 now have a cell phone”. Our greatest social media stimulus is the phones that we are able to carry and utilise to document our days in the way that blogging was widely used a decade ago. We now “blog” our day through “vlogs” via Snapchat Stories and Instagram Stories and posting statuses on Facebook, which are much less tedious than writing a prose about the events of my day. The convenience of being able to document events at any part of the day adds to the appeal of utilising social media platforms as a form of microblogging.
Retrospectively, some highly compelling insights were drawn from the consistent blogging task. It was found that the immediacy of microblogging on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat have become the preferred mode of blogging communication for millennials such as myself. Our desire to share and publish information has become an automatic process that requires little to no afterthought, and it is difficult to justify specifically why we feel the incessant need to constantly share certain information, with certain people, at certain times. I found that utilising multiple platforms at once enabled me to engage with a multitude of people at once in a bid to stay connected, however the standard of the conversations decreased as the amount of platforms rose. The process of authoring, publishing and distributing has been compressed for social media, making the creation of online media content accessible to anyone with a mobile device.
References:
- Lister, Martin. Dovey, Jon. Giddings, Seth. Grant, Iain and Kieran Kelly. New Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 2009. p. 11. Print.
- Foehr, U. (2006). Media Multitasking Among American Youth: Prevalence, Predictors and Pairings. 1st ed. Washington: The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, pp.1-5.
- Creative Commons Australia. (2017). How to attribute Creative Commons licensed materials. [online] Available at: http://creativecommons.org.au/learn/fact-sheets/attribution/ [Accessed 4 Apr. 2017].
- Stern, Susannah. “Producing Sites, Exploring Identities: Youth Online Authorship”. Youth, Identity and Digital Media (2008): pp. 96-114. Print.
- Miles, Adrian. “Blogs in Media Education: A Beginning.” Australian Screen, Ed. 41 (2006): 66-9.
- Day, Louis A. Ethics In Media Communications Cases And Controversies. 1st ed. California: Thomson Wadsworth, (2005): pp. 3-5. Print.
- Lenhart, Amanda. “Social Media And Mobile Internet Use Among Teens And Young Adults.”. Social Media and Young Adults (2010): pp. 3-5. Print.
