My blog is meant to be a platform which I share my experiences with music. It is my personal blog that I am using as an extension of myself and sharing with others the way certain songs or artists impact me. I believe that music is something very personal and is an extension of one’s personality. Therefore, most of my efforts with this blog has gone into creating something authentic and that I can proudly say I own (Thorn, 2012).
“It’s well known that people say and do things in cyberspace that they wouldn’t ordinarily say or do in the face-to-face world. They loosen up, feel more uninhibited, express themselves moreopenly ” (Suler, 2004). I share my experiences and explain why it makes me feel the way it does, and if I can’t explain it, I don’t try to because there’s a reason it can’t be placed into words. I think my blog might be helpful in terms of helping people express their own opinions. As an introvert, I prefer to keep to myself, and this course has allowed me to open up and share a comfortable amount of myself, through a medium that utilities the experiences and feelings of others. Thus, because this blog is meant to be more personal, I write using my own voice rather than through a formal tone. My goal is to connect with an audience that face the same issue as I do expressing myself. The changes I made to my blog were to mediate this. I followed a design structure similar to my personal style as a designer, and I voiced my content in such a way that stayed true to how I felt about the music I was listening to. Although my audience base is rather small, I am addressing them through authenticity. To interact with my audience, I mainly use audio, mainly the songs I want to highlight, and sometimes accompany it with visuals.
Looking back, prior to and during the beginning of the course, I believed publication was content alignment with visual identity, simply because of print/digital media publication. I believed that the content itself needed to be rich and deep, and the visual identity needed to reflect that intensity. Creating an online presence is part of my academics and going into this course, I felt confident in my ability to create a brand identity for a company. Because of this, I wanted to challenge myself, and created this blog to help create my own online presence and see how it differs from creating a branding and identity for a company/group/collective. This course has helped me understand the importance of quickly establishing an ethos and pathos for an audience to base your content off of.
This course helped deliver methodologies in establishing oneself in a digital landscape and why online presences matter. Rather than just being synonymous to media, publishing is more about information’s integration as part of technology and its effects on non-digitized documents. As we enter a new era of significant technological advancements, “the world around us is increasingly mediated by screens and our understanding of it defined by digital information, we are rapidly losing touch with our undigitized past, left adrift in an ever-changing ephemeral world of bits and bytes without our physical past to anchor us” (Leetaru, 2017).
Moving forward, as a design student interested in branding and identity, this course has taught me the steps beyond establishing an ethos and pathos, and how to develop interpersonal relations through an online presence. I believe this course has taught us how to stay true to our individuality and our values, but also expressive about how the content of others can assist self-reflection.
REFERENCES:
Leetaru, Kalev. (September 29, 2017). In a Digital World, Are We Losing Sight of Our Undigitized Past?
Suler, John. 2004. “The Online Disinhibition Effect.” Available from: Cyberpsychology & behavior 7.3 (2004): 321-326.
Jesse Thorn. 2012. “Make Your Thing.”
