Week1: Blogs I Commented On

This week's comments:

Larissa Bignotto

Masashi Kosugi

Siomara Ruiz Ramires

Jaquelyn Andrade Torres

Week1 B: Social Media Use Today

    Hi again readers, welcome back! Today we'll be discussing my thoughts about social media use. So subjective, but now you know. Now that that's out of the way... 

image from PublicDomainPictures.com

    I can confirm that personal social media users have highly individualized expressions. At its best, I've seen social media used to give people a bigger voice than they might have in their personal lives. Social media is used as a sounding board for people to experiment with expressing their identities and ideas. It also provides a platform for communities of people who share similar experiences. And there are so many other personal reasons to use social media that I don't even (want to) know about. 

    Small businesses are trying to get their quality products out to a bigger audience. And this is yet another area where social media really shines, because even in an economy that's far from bustling, the small business has a chance to survive, get their brand out, and make a name for themselves. Shipping a single order across the country may not be optimal, but with the way things have been over the last few years, having a brick and mortar store front can be even more tumultuous and ultimately, an unhealthy risk. One "great and terrible" thing about social media is it can scale to any size business.

image from PublicDomainPictures.com

    Mega businesses can use social media directly, through platforms to improve brand image. They can make sure the public knows that their enterprise supports a particular charity, or has helped create infrastructure somewhere. Often social media is used by these organizations indirectly; as in buying our residual data and using it to train AI what to like, which creates more effective algorithms to direct personalized advertising to us. 

    The reasons to use social media can be vastly complex, relatively simple, personal, professional, philanthropic, and predatory. Or any and all intersections of those reasons and more. It's like a calculus problem that has infinitely many answers and at the same time, just one answer - it depends on who's doing the using and why. And this is where my mind goes on a weekend morning. Hope you enjoyed the ride!

Week1A: My Blog Theme

Ayutthaya National Park, Thailand

    

    Hey readers, thanks for letting me be a part of your day! In this blog, you’ll (unsurprisingly) find my assigned posts for our class. I'll do my best to make it a good read! 

    When I set about to do this blog, the question that stuck in my mind was, “What do I want to see when I’m searching for something?” And then, “What do I really dislike seeing and how can I avoid those things?” Well, what I like to see, and quickly, are results. Basically, I want answers to my questions, and I don’t want to have to wade through someone’s corporately sponsored filler. Images do storytelling more efficiently than words, so I want to be able to lead the homepage with a relevant picture for each post. Awesome, Inc.’s theme met my need for showing and then telling.

Sunrise at Angkor Wat, Cambodia

    However, I wasn’t a fan of their background images. I went through each of the standard ones and then tried uploading images of my own. One of the first things I noticed with the stock images was that lighter backgrounds at the top of the page were more aesthetically pleasing, it seemed to help the title stand out. This led me to look for some pictures from my travels, because I have some great ones! 

    Unfortunately, I ran into a size limit issue for uploading the photos. A smaller photo was good to upload, but then it couldn’t be un-tiled – it appeared as a clutter of tiny dragon boat festival tiles across my page. At this point, I had played around a little too long with the advanced features and settled on simplicity in the end; I finally acquiesced to accept a very okay background from the Nature folder. Like so many things, it’s not perfect – but it will do.

Dragon Boat Festival, Macau

    Some other advanced options I explored adjusted the layout of the home page boxes and buttons, as well as the colors and text font for each element of the page. The default was better than my own adjustments. Finally, I was happy to be able to change the color of the title and make it more obvious against the new background. To think, when I looked at this assignment, I thought, I could never write that much on something I know so little about. How about that? Here’s to learning with you.