Week 6: Media, New Media & Social Media

Week 6 lecture was all about media and media types.

The lecture was taken by Adam Muir, who explained the many in and outs of the Internet, media and the adverse worlds they create for individuals.

Media and the internet:

In the twenty first century the Internet is considered a necessity, many individuals rely on the Internet as their primary source of communication. These people are known to belong to a virtual community and in addition due to their reliance on the internet, as a primary source of communication, form an individual identity that allows them to express who they are through the web.

Writer and teacher Howard Rheingold explains a virtual community to be, ' people carrying on public discussions long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships.'

The creation of virtual communities is very common in Internet social communication today. Take Facebook for an example, one status can produce a mass amount of feedback that can transform into a discussion, lasting a long period of time. In adding, blog posts such as this one can have the same effect, sparking a large amount of viewer interest that can easily hold the characteristics of the creation of a virtual community.

In relation to virtual identity the same principle applies, through an individual’s use of the Internet and the way they communicate, comment and portray themselves, they can adversely recreate themselves to form a virtual identity. The creation of a virtual identity can be as easy as changing age, gender or ethnicity on a social networking site.

Social Media:

Social media is a significant part of the World Wide Web and always has been. The early Internet allowed for people in different geographic locations to communicate with others over a larger amount of space.

Though primarily this is still happening, the focus from groups of people has moved away and allowed for the individual to become the, 'common thread', sharing and consuming the content of the Internet to create Ego-Centric Social Network.

Without the Internet, where would communication be?

It is a scary thought that the virtual world we have all become accustomed to might not have existed only some decades ago.