The things I post online and share on social media makes up the persona I allow people to see online. But what you see online is not always what you get in reality. Social media platforms allow you to become someone else. Something else. What you see on my Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest etcetera etcetera isn’t really who I am, more a warped reflection or the person I aspire to be.

The way you act and behave online does reflect on who you are. The people you follow, the things you share, post, like, all group together and define who you are online. However, the life we portray on these online forums is fake, we only show the best parts of what our life truly is and hide away the ugly.

It may seem that I am degrading the use of social media and how it is supposedly warping our perceptions of life, but this is not the case. It is okay to have these platforms and show the world the amazing things you are doing but what I want you to take from this post is… No matter what you see online and how jealous you may become of what you see, just know that there is more to what you see. Struggles, tears,  and heartache because nothing is really as it seems.

The concept of stacks… When I first heard it, it went in one ear and out the other. It wasn’t because the concept was necessarily hard to understand but I just didn’t understand why it was important.

It almost seemed too obvious and to have an impact on the media world. I was clearly mistaken. What I realised, though it took me a while, is that without one base layer, the rest cannot exist. In an example, without ios, you don’t have an iPhone, which doesn’t have an app store, which doesn’t have the Instagram app, which doesn’t allow you to post your life to its platform.

A stack refers to media platforms and how they can be built upon. What is crucial about this factor is that if people didn’t build on these platforms, then we wouldn’t be living in the world we are today. So yes, stacks are important, and though they can be seemingly irrelevant, they affect more than you could possibly imagine.

Have you ever really looked at what goes into creating a whole new universe or at least extension of the world you already know?

This is exactly what transmedia does every day. There are so many examples of transmedia in our society that everyone (who isn’t living under a rock) knows about. Star Wars, The Matrix, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter and so many more.

With so many entry points into these new and exciting worlds, it is hard for us as an audience not to be drawn in by at least one part of the variety of media’s. Both traditional and digital media types can be the source of entry for a world just as magical as Harry Potter. You would think that with so many ways to set foot into these worlds, that they would lose their appeal, their magic. Well, you couldn’t be more wrong. Not only does transmedia add ways to become apart of the world, it enhances the magic behind them.

Copywrite. We all know (or at least should) what it is. However, in the era we currently belong to, remix culture is so prevalent in the online community.  One of the big questions that have been proposed in the past few years is, how do we protect copywrite in a digital age?

It is a question that I cannot personally answer, especially when it is so simple to cut, copy and paste. Remix culture is turning copywrite upside down and it showcases that anything can be remixed.

One of the biggest meme phenomena of the past few years has been the mii channel music we all loved and hated as a child when playing on our Nintendo Wii. This music is and their concepts are in fact copyrighted, however, this could not stop me from chucking some music clips together and making it mine.

But is this really mine now? This is exactly the problem we now face in a digital world. It may seem like my own artistic creation but it’s really a cheap knock-off of an original masterpiece (if you can call Wii music a masterpiece that is)

What is a meme? But more importantly what is memetic warfare? It is a phrase you may or may not have heard in the media in the past few years, as the rise of social media has come into play.

In an article by the Motherboard describes, “Memes appear to function like the IEDs of information warfare. They are natural tools of an insurgency; great for blowing things up, but likely to sabotage the desired effects when handled by the larger actor in an asymmetric conflict.”.

 To shine a different light on this term, bringing it to reality, memes can be twisted and used to specifically target and harm others. There are many examples of this in the world, especially in the case of Hilary Clinton’s ad campaigns which were warped and circulated on social media platforms.

Memes, as much as they are fun and are all around us, they are powerful and can be the difference in making it or breaking it.

It takes a combined effort to make something go viral. That is one of the many beautiful things about the internet. For this week’s remediation of the topic, I wanted to focus on the ideas of collective intelligence.

To truly understand what collective intelligence is, you can use the internet as a perfect example. The use of social media allows a community to grow and collaborate on ideas, projects and so much more. The definition originated from a French cybertheorist, Pierre Levy and he states, “It is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills…”.

But what does the many brains and arrows portray? It may seem bizarre and unrelated but they represent a group of people connecting with each other, sharing their knowledge with one another, combining their skills to create something new. In a digital age, collective intelligence is essential in content creation and remediation.

What is journalism? Many define the term in different ways and there is a debate on what is and isn’t journalism.

In the eyes of many, journalism is saved purely for the professionals and not everyone can be a journalist. But here in BCM112, we challenge those ideas. Who said that reporting the news actually had to come from the newsroom? Raw, live and unedited footage can now be broadcast all over the world due to the creation of drones and the handy edition of 4G and portable wifi.

What I have created for this week is a video to showcase that journalism can come from both a traditional source, such as the 6 o’clock news on channel 7, or footage shot by a drone, that was live-streamed to Facebook or Instagram. We now live in a digital world where unmoderated dialogic media is taking over and will soon trump traditional news sources.

So, what do you think? Can drone footage count as journalism?

 

Digital a e s t h e t i c

Everyone knows what aesthetic is. Not only do we know what aesthetic is but everyone also has their own unique take on what it includes. Anything we have ever watched, passively consumed or even actively produced has influenced our aesthetics.

A question I pose to you is this if everyone has their own unique aesthetic, how do so many of us agree on what is aesthetic and what isn’t? I myself do not have the answer but by definition, aesthetic is concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty. Traditionally, fine art and the sublimity of nature was classified aesthetic and now in the digital age, this concept has dramatically changed.

Digital Aesthetic has revolutionised the classical ideas the world used to know. Anything can now be classified beautiful. Through glitching and remixing, a whole new aesthetic has taken the world by storm. Like I said in my previous post Tell Me the Message, it is incredibly easy to make your own media and perhaps become a part of the digital aesthetic movement yourself.

Go out there and create something aesthetic. Glitch it, remix it, just do it

 

“The medium is the message, the medium is the message, the medium is the message”

Hey guys, do you think that maybe, just maybe, the medium is the message? A concept brought to life by the man himself, Marshall McLuhan, but what in the world does it mean?

In the simplest form, whatever medium a piece of media is produced in, is a message in itself, in conjunction with what the piece of media is trying to portray. This concept goes so much further and has a much more influential meaning than what I have stated. This message has influenced the entire media world and now our BCM112 class.

But I’m really not here to recap the trippy lecture that my class went through, oh no, I’m here to show you my perception of the topic. Above, you can see a GIF that I made with a photo I took and edited. It may look somewhat impressive but in reality, it took me maybe a total of 10 minutes for the entire process.

It goes to show how quickly media can be produced. I think what I really trying to say here though is, look at our world. Look how quickly it is changing and how influenced by media it has become.

Don’t be scared of it. Embrace it. Make it a GIF. Make it a meme. Don’t just sit there and consume, actively make, use and produce.