Reflection

After taking part in the group work activity I can now confidently say I better understand media content, it’s creation and its circulation. Over time the internet has evolved from a producer to consumer format (like online shopping or news pages) to a producer to consumer who then reproduces for others to consume and so forth. And through time the audience of the internet has learned how this works and how to take part in it themselves. With the creation of platform such as Facebook, or MySpace back in it’s time, media has evolved and the connection between users has condensed so that content can spread from one end of the world the other with the click of a button. And then everyone, taking their world-views and cultures into account, can then alter and remix the content and share that with the world. It creates a diverse and prosperous media ecology. What needs to be taken into consideration is electracy – are people understanding the digital media that is being presented to them? For the most part it appears that certain media’s survive while others do not. Kind of an obvious statement. What I mean by that is that the content that embodies spreadability and stickiness are the ones that a major of internet users can relate to. In order to use the internet as leisurely as we do you pretty much need to be a part of a first world country. So media that discusses the life outside of a first world country, and not in a humorous way (because we have memes that do that) will not still because it isn’t “#relatable” (as people are saying now-a-days). Another common thing I noticed when taking part in the group work is the amount of remixes that carry intentional messages, rather than just humorous ones. This is fastly becoming a new form of sharing information in a way that is attuned to the ADD nature of this new generation. (and by ADD I don’t mean the literally definition, as to not cause offense. I mean that we have so much content being spewed at us at any given moment on the internet that it takes something unique and contagious to catch our attention among everything else).

What will be interesting to see is the way that academia attempts to catch up with this change in internet culture and this new form of learning – that is, if they do try at all. After observations of the way in which we learn, create and co-create on the internet that can definitely be applied into our education system since it is the way of the future.