I have watched a lot of videos and skipped even more. So, when the task of creating a self introduction video, my mind automatically pondered over the thought: what made me watch some videos and skip the others? And after days I finally found the answer; personality.
For me, the top main priority of my self introduction video was to show off my personality. And that is why most of the video was of me talking in my room (also due to the pandemic going on now), showing off the different dimensions of my personality. This task was not hard for me as I had quite a lot of my things in my room which I could show to the viewers, but one challenge was to how to make it captivating.
There are loads of YouTube videos out there where people introduce themselves so I thought of making it a bit more interesting by putting a twist of how to NOT make a introduction video, giving it a more interesting title and giving it a more sarcastic and humorous angle. This angle made it easier for me to speak more naturally to the audience rather than in an extreme scripted way which takes away the connection that viewers have with the video.
For the audio, I used my earphones’ microphone to record. And for the voice-over in the final part of the video, I used Audacity to record and put it over the video. One major challenge I faced was the different audio levels. The video had varying sound levels in the clip and it made the video seem non-coherent and I did not know how to tune the audio levels. This made me google and watch videos to learn and it allowed me the capability to tune the audio level of every clip in the video and make it all leveled.
The video was initially going to be fully set in the room but at the end of editing I realized that it needed more of the personality and my interest and some change of scenery as it might get too monotonous for the viewer, especially at the end. That is when I decided to look through my phone and put videos which I thought would suit the video best.
Another fun aspect of the video, especially the editing part was timing the snaps and seeing how it all came together. I was always fascinated by the ‘tricks’ in video and finally being able to do one myself was an extremely enjoyable experience.
Making this video, even though filmed in one location, made me learn new things and also broadened my mind to the art of making videos. I gained a deeper understanding into the passion of video makers and how they see this form as art. It also makes me want to create more content in a more creative way, giving the traditional videos a unique spin and making it my own. And creating my channel and publishing my first video online officially is an exciting thing which I look forward to exploring more in the future.
My thoughts: There are heaps of videos out there on YouTube and for a good introduction video, you need to be different than the rest and have a personality and be unique, which is what I liked in the 2 videos.
They both did what they had to; introduce themselves but they did it in such a way that set them apart and really wanted to make you watch the whole video.
Collaborator: A good self-introduction video immediately gets the attention of viewers with a strong start and a lot of personality.
I’ve noticed that good introduction videos project a consistent aesthetic and this speaks even louder than the words said on camera.
Podcasts are an extremely common form of media these days on the internet. They provide loads of information and the best thing about them is that you get a perfect balance of facts and opinions, which is why I was ecstatic to make my first ever podcast.
For me, the starting part was the most difficult one. The format of a podcast was known to me, but I faced a massive writer’s block while writing my script. I had a general idea of how the script was going to be and what content I should put in, but a lack of proper structure made it challenging, which is why I started with that.
I made notes regarding the structure and how I was going to introduce the topics. Choose a topic/question for the podcast, explain what the podcast is about, explain the main concepts presented in the podcast, present some examples and then conclude the podcast by condensing the overall concept discussed in the podcast.
Creating a structure helped in elevating the block I had, as I knew where I should start. The topic I chose, ‘What possibilities and risks does social media offer activists attempting to drive social change’, was a week’s topic in one of my college units, so I took some scholarly references from there and then I mainly used Google Scholar and Deakin Library catalogue to find some scholarly references for the podcast.
Sources were mainly used to describe the key concepts in the podcast such as social media, activism and slacktivism and also how activism has been affected by social media and how it has affected the activists. I refrained from using scholarly sources as examples and used a much more common example of twitter as more of my audience can understand it better and relate to it way better as it was something they have seen in their everyday life and most probably taken part in too, which was Twitter.
Twitter has always been a big platform for activists and gives everyone a chance to voice their opinions through its uses of hashtags (#). And as an active user of the platform, I thought it would make a highly relatable and easily understandable example which is also really impactful seeing how extreme big movements such as MeToo, BlackLivesMatter and MarriageEquality started from Twitter.
After writing a script, the next step was to record and edit. Recording was comparatively easy, as I recorded in sound bites of paragraphs, so it was easier to rearrange and edit. For editing, I used Audacity as it was a software, I was really familiar with because of continuous use of it throughout my college year for different projects.
Finding a creative commons for music was also easy. I had to go on SoundCloud and search up creative commons. After browsing through and finding a track that I liked, I checked the link and it was on YouTube, which is where I picked it from as I find it easier to reference from YouTube then SoundCloud. Piecing together my voice and the music and looping some parts of the track to create the background music along with the intro and outro was the most enjoyable part for me as I got to experiment with different sounds, volume levels and techniques.
Overall the experience taught me a lot, not just for creating a podcast, but also how to be organized and how to structure a project properly. The process was a bit tough at the start but after that it was a breeze and a really fun process to walk through.
Valenzuela, S 2013, Unpacking the Use of Social Media for Protest Behavior: The Roles of Information, Opinion Expression, and Activism, American Behavioral Scientist, 57(7), p. 920–942. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764213479375
Kietzmann, J. H. Hermkens, K. McCarthy, I.P. Silvestre, B.S. 2011, Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media, p.241-251, doi: 10.106/j.bushor.2011.01.005
Identity is ‘the fact of being who or what a person or thing is’. But as the time passed by and the technological advancements affected our society, especially with the introduction of internet, the true definition of what an identity has blurred a lot.
My online presence is not a stereotypical use of social media and various platforms just to connect with more people and socialize. For me, it is an escape from who I am and forming an identity for me which I never got to form in real life. According to Marwick (2013, p.357), the introduction of internet mediated ‘disembodied’ communication has caused the society to be free from the ‘discrimination based on race, sex, gender, sexuality or class’. This enables people to ‘experiment with different identities and personalities’.
But Marwick (2013, p.357) also discusses how this concept did not come to pass fully because people do no create drastically different identities and opt for relatively similar personas. Between the these two opposite sides of opinion is where my online identity mostly lies. My Twitter profile is a persona which leans heavily towards the professional and academic side by tweeting about academic and unit related tweets only. It consists of my professional accounts and links to those accounts, which give exposure to my academic writing and analyzations through an academic scope due to my account being used mainly for a professional angle and for my university units.
And while it is a different persona of me, it is not a radically different identity of mine as it is just an extension of me and showcases my academic skills. But my personal twitter account, along with other personal platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, while to some extent they are an extension of me, it is a persona of me which is drastically different than my persona in real life. The ‘my’ in the persona, the I, is a technical term in itself. According to Smith and Watson (2013, p.71), ‘that “I” is constituted through discursive formations, which are heterogeneous, conflictual, and intersectional, and which allocate subject positions to those who are interpellated through their ideological frames, tropes, and language’.
My real life identity in itself is a social construct which is consisted of the ideology and views enforced upon me and the online space that is created by the internet is like a safe haven to me, a place where my persona is shaped just by me as ‘internet subjects can be many things: they can be citizens, consumers, participants, gamers, lurkers, or stalkers, but generally the conditions of Internet subjectivity remain indebted to classic liberalism’ (Polleti and Rak, 2013 p.4). My online persona is a persona, which is unaffected by the factors which the ‘I’ in real life.
A noticeable trend in my online presence is that my personal online persona, created by me in my personal accounts, is not related to the professional one due to the prevention of it being influenced by the outer factors, which is the ultimately the reason I made my online persona, so that it can be free of outside factors. But your own identity in itself is unified as ‘identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions. They are subject to a radical historicization, and are constantly in the process of change and transformation” (Kennedy 2013, p. 30-31).
My online identity is branched into different categories for me, all forming different personas influenced by different factors and ultimately created by me with a goal in the mind. My twitter account portrays an identity which paints me in a professional and academic light, because it is what I created it for. And other accounts like WordPress are a branch of my academic and professional identity, showcasing my abilities, all of which is what I chose to put forward. These identities are created solely by me, with an end goal in mind.
The internet has created an internet mediated communication, which has conceived a free space, a space where it has allowed all of its users to create their own personas where they have the freedom to create new identities, the identities which are not affected by the outer factors related to their sexuality, gender, race, nationality or age. The identity you have in real life, you have no control over it but the online identity you create, it’s made entirely and majorly by you.
Internet has been the wave which has completely changed the entire landscape of the whole world. Practices, the way people think and act, everything has been influenced by the internet.
Identity, according to Oxford Dictionary, means ‘the fact of being who or what a person or thing is’. But internet has allowed us the ability to morph our own identity into whatever we want.
As stated by Turkle (1995, p. 342), ‘computer mediated communication can serve as a place for construction or reconstruction of identity’. This is one of the reasons why the online space created by internet is the preferred place of many users, due to its freedom of creation of the identity.
Internet offers its users the freedom of ‘what information to put forward, thereby eliminating visceral reactions that might have seeped out in everyday communication’ (Boyd, 2007, p.12). This gives its users the freedom to do actions which they can not do in real life.
One great example of this is the article, Veiling and Blogging: Social Media as Sites of Identity Negotiation and Expression among Saudi Women written in 2015 by Guta H. and Karolak M. where they explain how in Saudi Arab, a country ruled by patriarchy, women resort to the use of blogging to express their thoughts and have freedom which otherwise in real life, they don’t have.
According to Erving Goffman (1959), people present themselves differently based on context (where they are) and audience (who they’re with) which is why people tend to present themselves in a manner which would allow them to blend in with people better or even ‘to get experience that they are not able to have in real world’ (KiYanC, 2010).
Internet and the online space created by it has allowed people to blur the lines between races and genders as they can morph their identity and present themselves as whoever they want to, with reasons ranging from gaining new experience to escaping their reality, where their race or gender does not allow them to speak freely in real life.
Reference list
boyd, d. (2007). Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life. in D. Buckingham (Ed.) MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Learning Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume.
Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday
Journalism has heavily relied on physical sales from the start and as we are transitioning into the digital era, it is no surprise that the fundamentals on which journalism is based on are shifting drastically.
Social media
is becoming the main source of news which is why the companies whose sole focus
is on printing newspapers or typing out articles are declining.
Due to this, the revenue generated by the news organizations is decreasing, causing them to cut jobs or shut down the company.
To generate more revenue, newspaper sites can tend to online subscriptions but why should the readers pay to read the same thing they can find for free on social media instead, a question which has been tried to prove wrong by journalists.
This is why newspaper sites need to be more
alluring and entice the reader to visit their site and turn to them. They
should offer something new and fresh which cannot be found anywhere else,
making the reader feel like a subscription is worth paying for.
Journalism is stuck in a hard place at the moment due to the new digital era and if it does not find a unique aspect, or something fresh to offer, it might be the end of journalism as we know it.
Hello this is Saqib Ali, and I have no idea how you stumbled on here but welcome! I’m 18, from Pakistan and studying in Melbourne. I love music and dancing, even though I can’t dance, and going out. I like to label myself extremely friendly so don’t be scared to say hi or something.
Okay, maybe I’ve said enough now bye. Oh and if you want to add me on twitter:
This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.
This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.
You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.
Why do this?
Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.
The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.
To help you get started, here are a few questions:
Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
What topics do you think you’ll write about?
Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?
You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.
Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.
When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.
Organised Thoughts 