Project Brief 2: More Control Over New Media – Post 2
New media allows the creator to have more control over their content.
The establishment of social media changed the way individuals shared, published and edited their original content. Film photography gave people the ability to capture a moment in time and view it later on after the developing process. Digital cameras introduced instant gratification by displaying the picture on the device seconds after it was taken. This allowed photographers, casual or professional, to adjust their pictures on the fly. Memory cards were upgraded to store more images, allowing creators to take countless shots to ensure a plethora of choices for a favourite photo to emerge.
Enter camera phones, the device easily carried everywhere that can be used by anyone. A whole new generation of archivists, witnessing and recording their lives through a handheld device to share online for others to see. There is a social climate that suggests that someone must digitally save a moment for it to be believed, that others will only accept your story if you have visual proof of its existence. One new element introduced by interactive social media environments “is the degree to which such environments allow individual user feedback to affect and be incorporated into the stream of presented information” (Southwell & Lee, 2004, pg. 645).
I created the video above to showcase how an individual well-versed in social media creates content. My roommate Joshua and I constantly take photos or videos and spend hours editing and discussing them so I began to see the differences in how we each approached the task. I would open my phone’s camera application while Joshua would go straight to Snapchat, posting the picture there while I would post mine to Instagram later on. Joshua’s process is one focused on entertaining others in quick bursts as he keeps other people in mind when he uses Snapchat. If he finds something that is funny or he takes an appealing photograph, he will post it to his story which allows anyone to see it if they choose do to so. Other he curtails to specific people, using in-jokes and a shared interests to create a picture or video targeted for one person.
Joshua’s thought process in the above video reveals the desire people have to control as much of the new media sharing experience as possible. In a study undertaken for the Centre for the Study of Behaviour Change and Influence at the University of the West of England, it was shown that “Snapchat was mainly used to communicate with a single person rather than a group of people, and this person mainly includes close friends, partners and family members” (Piwek & Joinson, 2015, pg. 364). Users want diverse options when it comes to producing content for sharing online.
New media and the internet have given creators an overabundance of tools to edit and perfect the artefacts they create while also providing numerous avenues to share their work. New advances in established media forms, such as photography and videography, allowed creators to use “some of the formal and stable arrangements within the field [of photography], and these subtle changes are capable of transforming the entire configuration of the practice itself and therefore the field as a whole” (Cornelio & Cruz, 2014, pg. 10).
The sharing and creation of visual mediums is being consistently updated in response to the demand of the users. Social media applications such as Faceboook, Instagram and Snapchat are always being modified with new features and tools to give more control to the user as to how they shape their personal online experience.
Bibliography
Cornelio, G & Gomez, E (2014) ‘Co-creation and Participation as a Means of Innovation in New Media: An Analysis of Creativity in the Photographic Field’, International Journey of Communication, vol. 8, pp. 1 – 20
Piwek, Lukasz & Joinson, Adam (2016) ‘“What do they Snapchat About?” Patterns of Use in Time-Limited Instant Messaging Service’, Computers in Human Behaviour, vol. 54, pp. 358 – 367
Southwell, Brian & Lee, Mira (2004) ‘A Pitfall of New Media? User Controls Exacerbate Editing Effects on Memory’, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, vol. 81(3), pp. 643 – 656
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