The hottest medium; Insta & Influencers

In a world of constant connection and need to be online, Instagram has become a significant social media platform for all. Instagram came about in 2010 and quickly snow-balled into the biggest social media platform. This platform has been big in common, everyday people sharing their life with their friends and families, but in recent years fashion bloggers have been able to take the platform to a new level in our global village were immersed in.  

Think About the Children!

In a world filled with smartphones, iPads, social media and constant need to feel like you’re connected, it is extremely important to remember not just out friends are seeing our posts…

You can have your privacy settings set on the most private settings. You could only have people you personally know on your social media. You could have limited information about your school, work and the city you live in, but are you safe from data mining and collecting?

Forget about you! Think about the children! Your children.

Data Maniac Madness

Wired Option Security published an article on “How to Protect our kids’ data and privacy” in July of 2019.

This article disuses how digital identity is information on an entity used by computer systems to represent an external agent. That agent may be a person, organization, application, or device. The term “digital identity” has also come to denote aspects of civil and personal identity that have resulted from the widespread use of identity information to represent people in computer systems.

Shirky’s Views in a New Era

In his 2002 article, “Communities, Audiences, and Scale,” Clay Shirky posed two questions to start off his writing:

“Can we get the best of both worlds? Can we have a medium that spreads messages to a large audience, but also allows all the members of the audience to engage with one another like a single community?”

Virtual Communities are taking over

As we know, network access has allowed for RAPID growth in the world of Virtual Communities. A virtual community is a social network of individuals who interact through specific social media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals. Some of the most pervasive virtual communities are online communities operating under social networking services.

Marshall McLuhan… the psychic?

Marshall McLuhan states, “Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of ‘time’ and ‘space’ and pours upon instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men.” At first, I really had a hard time processing this. I was overthinking it. Back then, McLuhan was talking about television and radio, but now this old media has snow-balled into new media. This new media where we can quite literally “overthrow the regime or ‘time’ and ‘space'”, both literally and figuratively.

 

How do you take your media? Hot or cold?

Marshal McLuhan helps us understand the “hot” and “cold” forms of media and allows us to think deeper as to how it affects our society and everyday behaviors.

Hot media is that which engages one sense completely. It demands little interaction from the user because it ‘spoon-feeds’ the content. Typically the content of hot media is restricted to what the source offers at that specific time. Examples of hot media include radio and film because they engage one sense of the user to an extent that although the user’s attention is focused on the content, their participation is minimal.

Social Media as a Medium

First off, when I was reading this quote from McLuhan, I find it so fascinating that this works just as well now as it did in 1960. McLuhan had no idea the extent of the impact that his book, research and life work would have on so many different industries.

The Medium is the M(a)ssage

“The medium is the message“ is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan introduced in McLuhan’s book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964.^[1] It means that the nature of a medium (the channel through which a message is transmitted) is more important than the meaning or content of the message. McLuhan tells us that a “message” is, “the change of scale or pace or pattern” that a new invention or innovation “introduces into human affairs.”^[2]

The Importance of Shared Languages

Language, one of the most important forms of communication, but also one of the most complicated to understand. Language is one of the most used ways to communicate ideas, feelings, opinions, thoughts, etc., and there are over thousands of languages all over the world! Pretty cool, if I do say so. But what makes languages so special? How do languages, really help with communities or even audiences when it comes to communicating?