Ideal schmideal

From my experience dealing with avatars or profile pictures, I have learnt to always take them with a grain of salt (or a bucket in some cases). No one is ever going to be able to show you a complete rundown of themselves in the space of a Facebook ‘about me’, and so as E.T. Higgins, author of Self-Discrepancy: A theory relating self and affect, says; people ‘mediate their image, strengthen their virtues’. In doing so, people often present an image...

Courageous or Coward?

In Julian Assange’s interview with 60 Minutes (2013), he is referred to as an activist. Activism is defined as “the doctrine or practice of rigorous action or involvements as a means of achieving political or other goal, sometimes by demonstrations, protests, etc.” (Dictionary.com 2014) Referring to Assange as an activist may be the most accurate description of him, as the goal of Wikileaks was to inform citizens of government corruption. Codeinet 2013 Bertot, Jaeger & Grimes (2010) present the idea that social media is a strong tool...

Wreck-It Rudd

During the 2013 election, whenever I logged on to Facebook or Instagram, I was bombarded with statuses, photos and memes of everyone’s political opinions. People were absently mindedly contributing to the election campaigns by either agreeing or disagreeing (generally the latter) with the candidates. Entertainment was a major part of Kevin Rudd’s 2013 election campaign. By adopting words such as ‘selfie’ (self-photo) and ‘quiche’ (from...

Tweeter or time-waster?

When Twitter first burst onto the Social Media scene, it was a concept completely unheard of. 140 character posts and people 'follow' me?! It honestly seemed ridiculous to me. But Twitter then began to spread rapidly, with everyone I knew able to be contacted at the touch of the @ key. Since joining Twitter, I have made 56,050 tweets. A bit excessive but I guarantee most of those tweets were either my horoscope being automatically tweeted or about...

Mobile bricks

My partner and I live in a small mining town in NSW. A few months ago, we moved to a property about 10 minutes out of town. This meant we had no mobile phone coverage. -GASP!- I, personally, take my phone everywhere with me and having no mobile phone coverage at my own home was a huge shock to the system. I was sitting on the lounge watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S and felt like I’d been taken back to the 90s when you actually had to talk to people (I know,...

Blogs & Blogs & Blogs

This teaching period, I chose to study Social Media as an elective for my degree. Let's just get one thing straight; I hate writing. So why did I chose a unit with so much writing? I'm not quite sure actually, but let's see how we go. This may well turn into a farce where everyone comes to find humour in my lack of writing skills.  Blogging. How could someone's usually meaningless ramblings be of any interest to a bunch of complete...