This blog post is part of my coursework for ALC201.
Who is Tim Deller? What exactly is my online identity? When I think of these questions myself to do with my online persona I immediatly think of the social media sites that I use most often, mainly Facebook. This post will look at how I portray myself through my Facebook profile, and I'll briefly look at a video I created for YouTube about my time overseas.
My Facebook
profile is pretty much the only social network that I regularly check and
update. I have a twitter but I only
really use it for class related coursework and at the most I’ll only check it
once a week. Even this blog was only
created for another subject at Deakin. .
I believe my
Facebook profile directly represents who I am in real life. I don’t like it when I view someone’s page
and it doesn’t reflect who they are when I meet them face to face. My profile shows who I am, my interests and
what I like to do. It is a very relaxed
and easy going sort of atmosphere, which is what I’m like in person. This is best exemplified in my profile
pictures.
These are the
profile pictures I’ve had on my page that have lasted the longest. The phone is simply a long running joke I’ve
had after I was simply talking on the phone one day out with friends, they took
a photo of my in a similar pose to these and the tradition stuck. I feel these photos represent who I am; a
relaxed funny dude who just lies back and lets the world take me along for the
ride. This quote from Hills (2009) I
feel is particularly true when talking about profile pictures. ‘Profile pictures have also started to be
thought of as corresponding to a type of photographic opportunity while users
are on the go or participating in offline social events’ (Hills 2009, p. 119),
and I certainly do this when the opportunity arises to take one of my phone
photos, I will actively pose with the thought in my mind that this will be my
new profile picture.
The other
form of social media which I only just started contributed to is YouTube. I recently went on a trip to the United
States, and similar to how I portray my profile pictures on Facebook, I used
certain situations when out sightseeing to create a video which shows all the
places I went to while highlighting my fun and relaxed personality.
YouTube is
all about participatory culture, which is a term that is often used to talk
about the apparent link between more accessible digital technologies (Burgess
& Green 2013, p. 10). The way I
intend to use YouTube is to show the links to my generated videos from my
Facebook and Twitter accounts, and have the friends and followers from those
sites to go to my YouTube channel.
Basically I treat my YouTube account the same as I do my Facebook
account.
Reference
List
Burgess, J
& Green, J 2013, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, Wiley,
(eBook)
Hills, M
2009, ‘Case study: social networking and self-identity‘, in Creeber, G and
Martin, R (eds.), Digital Cultures: Understanding New Media, Open
University Press, Maidenhead, pp. 117-21 (eBook)
Nice article Tim.
ReplyDeleteI liked how you managed to talk exclusively about profile pictures, a topic that seems to have such little volume, however you showed me through literature the true important role they can play. I like your uses of past profile pictures to break up the article and allow for short intermissions in the reading. All the best to your social media future!
Hi Tim, I very much agree with you, profile pictures are of great importance in the social media world, and do reflect greatly on how a person is perceived and especially how they want to be perceived. Another interesting social media forum that continues to intrigue me on a similar level is instragram, where posts are judged on their ‘likes’, and also provide a profile of the users ‘personality’, which like you said may or may not reflect their real life personality. I like the way your article is written and the way in which you have tied in your references neatly, they provide good evidence for your post. Your post was a very enjoyable read and video.
ReplyDelete