Here I go again

It was a bit of a Deja vu when I read the syllabus for the seminar New Media and Society. As a part of our final grade, students are required to start writing a blog, which was also one of the assignments we had to do for the Social Media class I took when I studied at Oklahoma State University as an exchange student. This seemed like a great, if not perfect, opportunity to revive the blog I was writing. Considering that the topics of both blogs are related, I decide not to start a new blog but to continue with the one I started two years ago.

I got my Bachelor’s degree in Media and Communication Studies and I’m currently a postgraduate student in the program Strategic marketing. I find new media and all different options they offer interesting thus I decided to attend New Media and Society seminar. I’m also planning to write my Master’s thesis in connection with new media (social media) and its strategic use in marketing/PR/advertising and this seminar may provide many useful information and knowledge.

Before taking Social Media class, I was using some social network sites (mostly Facebook), instant communication tools (Skype, MSN) and digital libraries for my personal purposes and never thought of this tools as something that can be usefully applied to professional or academic sphere. I became more acquainted with other tools offered in digital communication environments during the before-mentioned class, where we were required to use Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, delicious, Flickr etc. We also used Wikis and Ning platform on which we created site for purposes of the class work.

Knowledge is a way for better and easier usage of the new tools that digital world is offering therefore I hope to learn many useful things during this course.

Writing? Video? Photo?

Do you think you are not good at writing? And because of that you don’t want to actively use various social media? Well, this is not a problem at all. The beauty of social media is also their multiformity. Instead of writing blog, twitting short thoughts, writing notes on you Facebook page, you can grab your camera and take a photo that tells all. Or even better, you can make a video. Is not that difficult. With all the technology available nowadays is actually really easy. You can even edit it with several different programs enabling that. Using photos and videos can make social media even more appealing – it’s hard to resist a funny video or an interesting photo.

And my theory in practice

Never say never

Blogging… I always thought of it as something fascinating and interesting. But to be honest, I never felt like writing a blog. I just don’t think I have so much to say to the rest of the world. It seemed kind of mission impossible to come up with a decent and intelligent set of thoughts on a regular basis – maybe every week or even every day. But this is probably just me not knowing how to take things lightly once in a while. I’m starting to realize not every blog post needs to be a PhD dissertation (I certainly do hope my assumptions are correct ).  Anyway, this was not enough for me to make the first step to the blogging world. And then we got the assignment in Social Media class. I had pretty mixed feelings about it. It went from What?, to Really? and ended with I can’t write in English every week. But when I thought everything through, I realized this is the perfect assignment for me. I said to myself, why not  kill two birds with one stone.

I just turned in my application form for my bachelor’s theses (I will graduate from my home university where we need to write short thesis also for bachelor’s degree). My title, which is about to evolve, is Social Media and Identity Thefts. And what is better for researching social media than using and engaging in social media itself? I guess nothing. My hope is that writing this blog will force me to actually start doing research and gathering information. After all, I need to write something new every week. I was just too overwhelmed with everything until now, so I just kept postponing the work and avoided thinking about it. Knowing that I need to show some progress every week sounds like a good motivation. My silent wish (apparently not so silent anymore) is that I will get some comments, suggestions and hints that might help. I will keep my fingers crossed!