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Week 12 – Digital Branding:

This week I learned that unlike the picture used for this post, digital branding isn’t all about logos or how a brand looks. Visual identity is still important, but it isn’t the main thing surrounding Digital Branding, especially now in our current digital age. As  Daniel Rowles says in Digital Branding: A Complete Step-by-Step Guide to Strategy, Tactics and Measurement”  digital branding is really about the “sum of our online experiences.”  Two-way communication is prevalent between brand and consumer everywhere now, Live chat is there to assist consumers, Twitter direct messages can get a response in minutes, and some brands even reply to comments directly on their Instagram posts when consumers seek clarification. I enjoyed this topic as we encounter brands everyday, albeit through deciding what drink to buy at lunch or what brand of clothes to buy in a shop. Combining this with my previous knowledge on brands in the literal sense, through how logos can be encoded and decoded (Stuart Hall) proved helpful in my essays in this module. 

References: ROWLES, D. (2014). Digital branding: a complete step-by-step guide to strategy, tactics and measurement. London, KoganPage.

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Week 9 - Digital Natives

This week we learned about the difference between Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants. The term ‘Digital natives’ can be defined as individuals born after 1980, and who was brought up in an environment in which they can easily access and use technology, as they have the skills that some digital immigrants do not possess. ( Prensky, 2001). Digital immigrants are individuals who are not brought up with the same access to technology, explaining the lack of skills that they have in comparison to Digital Natives.

This topic was very interesting as it introduced me to terms I hadn’t heard of before, but knew of at the same time. For example, upon learning the term digital natives I understood that I was a digital native and that my parents would be the Digital immigrants in this context. I am always helping my parents out with emails and online forms, so the definition explaining how digital natives have skills that digital immigrants do not possess and that they can multi-task is certainly true!

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Week 4 – Media and communication:

This week we discussed Stuart Hall’s encoding and decoding theory. This traditional viewpoint of sender/message/receiver was challenged through his Encoding/Decoding model of communication. He believed that not everyone decodes the same way with many factors involved. Cultural background, the class that an individual is in society can all affect how individuals perceive the meaning of something. We learnt about the Negotiated, Dominated and oppositional media response too. A negotiated response is when the reader partly understands the meaning and broadly accepts the preferred understanding from the producer. However, they still mould this information that they decode to fit their own viewpoints. Dominant reading involved decoding the message fully how the producer wanted the audience to while oppositional is the opposite. We also learnt about Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message’ which made me think about how the mediums we use can affect meaning. This was one of my favourite topics and I enjoyed exploring it in my essays.

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Week 1 – Networked self:

In our first week of the Digital Culture module, we learnt about the networked self. With the emergence of networked publics, we ourself have a networked self. Our networked selves have the ability to interact and engage with the media we consume, as the very root of what the media is created for is to be targeted towards our networked self. To understand this more I read the book A networked self: identity, community and culture on social network sites by Zizi Papacharissi.

We had a range of readings that we looked at to understand it better. Below is some quotes we looked at to better understand the meaning of what a networked self is.

“an idealised performance of who a user is” (Schwartz and Halegoua, 2015) a “look at us” presentation that mainly depicts “visual evidence of social networks” (Mendelson and Papacharissi, 2011) “a narcissistic photography of self-expression” (Papacharissi, 2011: 317). The spatial Self: presentation of the self based on geographic traces of physical activity Schwartz and Halegoua (2015) “a performative nature to a variety of audiences” (Mendelson and Papacharissi, 2011: 256)

References -  

PAPACHARISSI, Z. (2011). A networked self: identity, community and culture on social network sites. New York, Routledge.

Mendelson, A., Papacharissi, Z. (2011). Look at us: Collective narcissism in college student Facebook photo galleries. In Papacharissi, Z. (Ed.), A networked self: Identity community and culture on social network sites (pp. 251-273). London, England: Routledge.

Schwartz, R. and Halegoua, G. R. (2015) ‘The spatial self: Location-based identity performance on social media’, New Media & Society, 17(10), pp. 1643–1660.

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Field Trip - Computer Gaming and Gender

On the 10th October 2018 we went on a field trip to the V&A gallery where we went to see a video games exhibition as a class. I love video games personally so seeing what goes into creating specific games such as ones on mobile, console and even VR games were very interesting. The field trip was a great help to understand the week in which we covered Games and Gender especially the reading material Henry Jenkins, 'Complete Freedom of Movement: Video Games as Gendered Play Space'. The exhibition highlighted many things such as “Disruptors”, games that have been heavily influenced by political, racial and cultural voices. The exhibition made me think twice when playing games, such as games I might let my younger brothers play. Games such as Grand theft Auto have been linked with violence from males, drug abuse etc ever since it was released so ensuring that younger children are not exposed to things like that is crucial. Kafai et al.’s Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat was an interesting read, highlighting the ways gender stereotyping are linked with digital game play.  

The 'Lara Croft' approach has allowed allow gender roles to be challenged, with  violent, heroic and domineering female protagonists entering the gaming vocabulary. - Kafai et al (2008)

Kafai, Yasmin & Heeter, Carrie & Denner, Jill & Y. Sun, Jennifer. (2008). Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New Perspectives on Gender and Gaming.