Reflections upon blogging

I remember there is a story about a boy crying over a broken clock:

‘Why did you put that clock out of the window, son?’ Daddy said.

‘Because Daddy you said time flies…’ Son replied.

Photo by erdavid

 Time passed so fast that I cannot imagine it has been six weeks since the first blog post was established.

Though we had to write a post a week, the experience of blogging was still pleasurable as we had great freedom in choosing the topics to write and in the way we organised our posts. It was at least more interesting than doing any other essay or report assignments that we normally have, haha.  

So in this officially final post, instead of writing about another new topic of new media, I would like to sum up what I have written and reflect upon the experience of blogging them.

Things learnt in this course

Over the seven weeks, I was introduced to various concepts related to media, including visual layout design of websites, illusory attention and participatory culture. Though not all of these concepts were new to me, I always found it interesting and sometimes inspiring to use them to explain a modern social media phenomenon.

Among those concepts, I have chosen to write about social networking, meme and affinity space as I felt that I could relate myself to them the most. Posts were then written accordingly, namely ‘What if Facebook ends?’, ‘Meme: Creative idea starts as sparkle’ and ‘My little corner; the affinity space’.

To me, I think ‘My littlecorner; the affinity space’ is the best post that I have written in this blog. This is because I was more analytical in writing and was able to share more my own thoughts as I know photography pretty well. I remember that it was a true pleasure for me writing that post. 

The best post that I have written 

Experience of blogging

Before studying this course, I used to think blogging about social media would not be very difficult to do since I grew up with it. I also thought that as I keep a diary, it should be easier task for me too.

However, the truth is blogging is more difficult than I imagined. It was quite difficult for me to come up with a very interesting or creative topic so as to attract others to read my blog. That was then I realised that I did not know the media as well as I thought I did. I had to do research before writing – sometimes it took quite a long time to brainstorm a good topic and find correct information.

Also, it was also a challenge for me to strike a balance between the content and word counts. I understand that people would not like to read long posts so I always tried to be concise when writing. I usually write a lot when it comes to sharing. :P

Nevertheless, I like this blogging assignment because it allowed me to explore areas that I would not know if I had not done research about it. I also got to know more about interesting concepts like Faksters as well as helpful media tools such as Delicious, which makes me feel that I do learn something!

Delicious.com  - one of the useful online resource tools I got to know in this course 

Experience of commenting

Olivia, Ray, Tiffany and Wendy are my blogmates and it has been truly enjoyable reading their blogs as well as others’. Each of them has his/her own style of blogging that I like, for example, Olivia always has a nice title for each blog post and Ray likes to randomly use capital and small letters for the headlines.

Their blog posts are interesting to read too. I gave quite a lot of comments to their blogs. So here are the links to the comments that I have made:

• Olivia’s blog: 'Let's explore my digital life' , 'Following Cookie Monster on Twitter', 'Ultimate way to search'

• Ray’s blog: 'CatCH ATTention', 'The layout of famous Youtube'

• Tiffany’s blog: 'My digital life and more', 'Simple yet taste great', 'On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog'

• Wendy’s blog: 'My digital life', 'Importance of layout' , 'Interactive Internet life'

I also gave comments to others’ blogs earlier, such as on Gigi's blog: 'My digital life'. 

All I can say for the commenting experience is receiving comments from others is truly a great driving force for one to continue blogging. So I’d love to receive comments!

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Writing for new media has been a fun and inspiring course to study. I’ve learnt various concepts from it and I enjoyed doing the assignment so far. I look forward to other assignments in this course and explore more about the world of new media.

And very lastly, thank you for reading this long summary post to the very end! I hope you enjoy reading my blog :)