Blog Post #3- My Thoughts On Social Media

The only social media platform I no longer use is LiveJournal. The site was launched in 1999 and is a corner of the Internet that allows users to publish blog posts, journal/diary entries, and fan fiction. I created an account on LiveJournal in May of 2014 so I could blog about my New England travels. Not going on the Florence trip with my classmates in Regina Flynn’s travel writing course, helped me fall in New England over spring break. I wrote a travel essay about Concord, Massachusetts, and realized through the experience how oblivious we can become to the wonders around us. 

In January of 2015, I decided to give my blog a makeover by transferring it to the blog-publishing service, Blogger. Blogger was also born the same year as LiveJournal, but is a better site for blogging if you want to gain more readers and have a more polished looking site. What I love about Blogger is content can be uploaded to your Twitter, Facebook, Google +, and Pinterest accounts and you can add the Bloglovin’ widget so readers can subscribe to your blog and always get e-mail notifications when you publish content. Additionally, Blogger can help you keep track of your stats and analytics. 

A screenshot of my blog. 

The social media platforms I currently use besides Blogger are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube (I’ve never uploaded a video to the site; I have an account so I can  follow my favorite YouTubers and post comments on their videos). I’m content with my social media settings, but if there was one thing I could change it would be PotterMore. I created a PotterMore account in December of 2013  to find out which Hogwarts house I belonged in- my result was Ravenclaw. According to the all reliable website, Wikipedia: 

“Pottermore is a website focusing on the unknown parts of the Harry Potter series and re-telling the story in an interactive way…The site features Rowling’s thoughts, several pages of unpublished text, and a sales resource for e-book and audiobook versions of the seven Harry Potter novels.” 

Pottermore is not a social media platform and when Rowling first announced it in 2011, many fans believed they would be receiving a Second Life-esque opportunity to experience the magical wizarding world when they became mebmers. Though I’ve never used Second Life, I would be down for an interactive community for Harry Potter fans. I have loved the  series since I was seven and I used to own all of the PlayStation and computer games. 

Fans of Harry Potter were hoping they could experience the wizarding world through a Second Life-esque platform when they made their Pottermore accounts. 

Pottermore.(n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/  

  Pottermore

Blog Post #2- Social Media In My Life

One of the most diverse English courses offered at Salem State University is ENL 411, Special Topics, because every semester its’ topic changes. I took this class because as a professional writing concentration it is  a requirement. Because I was never too keen on any of the previous topics this is why I have waited until my last semester to take it. To me though, I feel I really lucked out in taking this course now because having a knowledge of how social media impacts our personal and professional lives is extremely important in today’s world. 

While I prepared tonight for my first full week of school, I couldn't help but reflect on all the social media lessons I learned last week. The biggest thing I learned is it's necessary across a multitude of fields to have a lively social media presence. You or your business don't exist if they're not on social media.  

After our first class on Tuesday, I read some of the assigned readings I have for my internship. This semester I am serving as a research assistant on Dr. Scott Nowka’s digital humanities project. In a chapter I read from the book Debates in the Digital Humanities, I learned that the world of digital humanities would cease to be the next big thing in academia if it weren't for social media. Here is an exert from the reading:

“Twitter, along with blogs and other online outlets, has inscribed the digital humanities as a network topology, that is to say lines drawn by aggregates of affinities, formally and functionally manifest in who follows whom, who friends whom, who tweets whom, and who links to what” (Kirschenbaum 8). 

On Thursday, the conversation of social media came up again when I attended the first meeting of the semester for Soundings East, Salem State's literary journal. That day the staff brainstormed ways we can connect more with our virtual community. 

The social media platforms I use are Facebook, Twitter, Hootsuite (I am the social media assistant for Bruce Perry, the Assistant Dean Of Enrollment Management and Student Life, and I use this social media management system when I work for him), and WordPress/Blogspot. What I hope to gain from this class is how to build an audience for  the Salem State social media channels I oversee, Red Skies and my personal blog; how to collaborate with other content creators; and the do’s and don’t of social media in the workplace.  I feel I have a great understanding of what not to post on my personal accounts, but would like to know more about social media in the career world that way I can look as polished and marketable as possible  to future employees. 

Kirschendbaum, Matthew. “What Is Digital Humanities and What's Doing It Doing In English  

         Departments?" Debates In Digital Humanities. Ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis: 

         University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 3-10. Print. 

Blog Post #1- Second Life

Today in Social Media and Collaborative, we watched a documentary about Second Life, to learn about the pros and cons of social media. The documentary was crazy, but I enjoyed it because my best friend and I love watching MTV's True Life in our spare time.

In the documentary, an English couple met on the site and we're so obsessed with Second Life they had their wedding on the platform!  Yes, they actually made friends and family members make avatars so they could be present. The other women in the documentary was a married American woman from the West Coast who became addicted to Second Life after she became unsatisfied being a stay-at-home mom. She had four children and the most devoted husband and would be on Second Life for 14 hours a day!! She was basically having an affair with a man from across the pond whose name was Elliot. He had an avatar that only wore jeans and weapons. To figure out if she was actually in love with Elliot and not his social media presence, she traveled to England to meet him in person. I was happy Elliot didn't end up having any real feelings for her. She was very selfish, and while I watched the documentary I kept hoping her husband would leave her, but unfortunately he never did. At the end of the documentary, the husband compared himself to Forrest Gump. Although he knew he deserved better, he couldn't leave his wife because he was, to quote the musical Grease, "hopelessly devoted."

I'm not sure when the documentary was released, but the narrator did say Second Life is one of the biggest social media platforms. I found that really hard to believe and when I did some research on Wikipedia, the article said Second Life had one million users in 2013. I believe the documentary came out in the early 2000's. Second Life was founded in 2003, a year before Facebook.  It took Facebook ten months to gain 1 million users, and I didn't create my account till 2008, which I really view as the year Facebook became a mainstream phenomenon. Today Facebook has 1.65 monthly active users. I have been unable to find out how many people use Second Life in 2016, but the site is still active.

Another surprising thing I learned from this documentary is some users on Second Life actually make a living off the site. Now that just blew my mind! thought the only social media platforms people could make money off were the most prolific ones, such as Instagram, YouTube, and Vine. Turns out I was wrong.