After a wile away from it, I think that my project looks pretty good. I think that the buttons could be a little bit more “professional” looking, but I am unconcerned with their distractions from my site. I think that the site itself did a very good job at representing my social media footprint. I have had some insight, and like i mentioned in our lecture today, I think that the images I used represent the communities that I associate with, the people I follow, the people that follow me, as well as my activity on different social media. I believe that the images on some of these pages are very appropriate in describing my personal media experiences. The gifs not only portray the images and communities I belong to and own on social media, but also my emotions and actions while using social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, and interacting with people on said platforms.
I am an interracial, queer-identifying, division one student athlete who is double majoring at an out of state school. To say the very least, I am diverse. My posts are just as diverse as I am. If anything, my social media acts as a medium for me to be even more diverse and expressive than I am in the real world because I have a virtual shield acting as a protection. Hate, shame, and embarrassment can all be deleted as a post, but not as an emotion in the real world, so social media allows many people, not t just me, to be whoever they so chose to be.
This information cannot be easily quantified. You really can’t say that I am a level 100 on the crazy scale by things I post. There are limitations to this type of information. Social media hours logged, time spent on certain sites, time spent watching videos, number of sites viewed a day, what is liked, hashtag counts, and anything that can be quantified is not personal. It is data taken about a person and may lead you to infer things about the person, however, it does not allow you their feelings, their actions, or their emotions. you get that from filters, content of hashtags, posts meanings, and imagery. The electracy that these things have on people is unquantifiable in my opinion.
Affective media is affective and even effective due to its emotional appeal, its take away from current reality (because everything being posted is past), and its connections to real life situations. This cannot be written, documented, or analyzed via academia. This has to come from the heart.
The mediated identity experience is a part of everyone’s experience so as long as they have any mediated experience. It’s that simple. Any time logged on a chat room, any time spent on a social media site, any thing posted on any website becomes a part of your social media experience. You, from there, create connections with institutions, individuals, and entities, that influence your decisions, thoughts, and worldview.
Jaron Thomas 