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Technological developments, resulting in free user-friendly interface applications, led to the second step in the evolution of the World Wide Web, the Web 2.0. The Web 2.0 reflects a paradigm shift, from the “read web”, another platform of mass communication, whose advantages over the traditional media were in terms of functionality: better storage of large amounts of data, better manipulation and selection by means of hypertext and linkage, towards the “read/ write web”. The Web 2.0 is a typical manifestation of a new paradigm, convergence culture, a space where the concepts of author and audience/user cannot be distinguished, a space of horizontal co-authoring, augmented by the use of technology as platform of communication exchange.
Although the main purpose of the Web 2.0 is to empower the users who group themselves in online social networks, the degree of control of the user generated content in the Web 2.0 space depends on the application. PoliticalBase.com is a comprehensive application that defines itself as an “user-powered online community providing bi-partisan commentary, information and conversation about US Politics”. It is thus an online community of interest, gathering collective knowledge by means of user contributions, centered around the topic of political news in the US.
The application offers various tools. The front page of PoliticalBase.com highlights news submitted by Political Base users. The most innovative tool is the Money Track, which allows you to see how much money U.S. political candidates have raised, from what states, counties and even persons they have raised it from, by building diagrams based on data collected from the Federal Election Commission. This is however not a Web 2.0 feature, as only the administrators can introduce data. The other tools offered are topic centered wikis, focusing on several categories: political people, political issues and political groups, that are edited by users and evaluated by moderators. The application also has a forum section. The difference between PoliticalBase.com and Wikipedia as far as control over content is concerned, is that the structure of the wiki created by PoliticalBase.com compels users to enter specific types of content in fixed categories, the content being afterwards review by staff moderators. For example, on the page for Democratic candidate Barack Obama, you can vote on your perception of this politician in different areas, see his political affiliations, and find out where he stands on the issues, as a result of the data introduced in the wiki categories.
In spite of the good ranking as far as data and functionality are concerned, PoliticalBase.com is a quite hierarchical and undemocratical online community, since the moderators have veto power: “For brand new users Political Base moderates all new content submitted into the system. The content is either added or deleted within 24 hours after the submission is made. As users submit quality content, they earn points which rank them in the community and open up more editing options in a less strict environment, often earning live edit access to the majority of the site. Submissions made are moderated by an internal staff and by high scoring users from within our user base. At any time you can view your point score at the top-right of your “my base” section.”
The application distinguishes thus between two categories of contributors: moderators and users, and places the evaluation of the moderators above the evaluation of the readers, which may lead to biased information, especially if we take into account the political nature of the website. From this point of view the application disregards the aspect of socialization of the web 2.0 applications and maintains the traditional hierarchical structure of collaboration, aspect that may push away potential users. On the other hand, the meritory system of gaining editorial liberties by means of votes, can be seen as a method to make users responsible of the content placed online.
Today we are all enjoying this second step of the web evolution, the web 2.0, a read/write space where we can actively participate and create content by blogging, we can meet individuals that we would otherwise not have access to, by registering in social networks and creating online communities, and where we can use a lot of other interactive tools. The internet thus has the potential to largely expand our informational and relational capacities in a multitude of directions. Nevertheless, humans’ behaviour online seems to disregard the real capacities and potential of the internet. The behaviour of individuals online seems to be following an intrinsically human principle of behaviour that guides our actions in real life, defined by sociologists as homophily. Homophily refers to humans’ tendency to associate and connect with individuals similar to them in certain aspects, people who share their interests, values, culture, who have the same demographical, racial characteristics, etc., which leads to one of the main characteristics of a social network, which is homogeneity. This principle of homophily is the foundation of the most various human relations and networks, from marriage, to friendship, work, information exchange, and others. Homophily, a concept that can be expressed by the saying: birds of a feather flock together, plays an essential role in shaping our individual and collective view of the world. Sociologists acknowledge that “Homophily limits people’s social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience”. The same principle is guiding our behaviour online and there are several types of applications that exploit it. One example are online social networks. On Facebook, Hyves, MySpace, etc., individuals connect with other individuals that they know in real life, and with whom they presumably have common interests or other socio-demographical, behavioural, and intrapersonal characteristics, and then with the friends of their friends, and with potential friends that are automatically suggested to them by the application, based on common profile characteristics. Although the web 2.0 does amplify the broadening of our network with people whom it would be unlikely to meet in real life, it is said to also amplify the narrowing of our spectrum of knowledge in other fields, if our actions online are aimed only at reinforcing our own ideas, by, for example, registering in groups that share our interests or subscribing to feeds on a particular subject that we are interested in. Another type of online application that reflects well homophily, upon which Ethan Zuckerman drew attention in his presentation yesterday, are the media aggregators. Media aggregators are online applications that maintain subscription to feeds of media content coming from various sources: blogs, vlogs, etc. The content of these media aggregators is determined most of the times by user votes. It would not be surprising, if we were to analyze the profile of the users that are involved in the voting systems, that their profile is similar to ours, individuals who subscribe to feeds through these websites. And Zuckerman draws attention on this aspect in one of his interviews by raising a question: “If you look at sites like Digg and Reddit, these are sites that promised the future of journalism, where we would all get together and decide what’s important. …But that begs the question: Who’s ‘we?’”. And the answer to this question would be: people who have similar interests to ours. Zuckerman further develops this idea in another one of his declarations: “Cass Sunstein, an amazing legal scholar, says that one of the dangers of the internet is that we’re only hearing like voices, and that makes us more polarized […]. What’s incredible about the net is we have this opportunity to hear more voices than ever. But the tools we tend to build to it have us listening to the same voices again and again.” Zuckerman makes it clear that it is not the internet that is intrinsically wrong, but that individuals tend to use it in limitative ways: searching and selecting information and individuals mainly to reinforce their own ideas: “Encountering new ideas isn’t a supply problem in today’s internet - it’s a demand problem. There’s a near infinity of people unlike you creating content and putting it online for you to encounter. But it’s entirely possible that you’ll never encounter it if you don’t actively look for it… or unless the systems you use to find ideas start forcing you outside your usual orbits into new territories.” Zuckerman takes a strong position against homophily: “Homophily can make you really, really dumb”. He opposes to the effects of homophily another concept, serendipity: “Search in the future needs to lead us to people, to places, to voices. My hope is that in the future we get over homophily and we start looking for really productive serendipity - the sort of serendipity when you go to that shelf in the library and you think you know the book that you’re looking for, but you actually find the book you’re really looking for within 2-3 shelves of it. You think you’re looking for info on the US elections, but you end up finding info on how the Jamaicans are viewing the US elections. You think you’re looking for info on network security and you end up finding information on why Pakistan is so afraid of YouTube.”
On the other hand, homophily is seen as a good aspect by communication theorists from certain points of view because it facilitates communication. It eliminates communication barriers coming from various types of differences between individuals, that lead to misunderstandings or distortion of messages. It leads to effective communication, effective collaborations between individuals and collaborative development of ideas. The downside of homophily derives from the fact that, although we efficiently and “comfortably” communicate with like minded individuals, we have the tendency to avoid contacts that take us out of our “comfort” zone, which can be a field that we are not in control of, have few information about, or are unaware of: “We know so little about one another, and what we do know is generally so wrong, that our first instinct is to try to shut each other off.” Fighting the homophily instinct is an effort that will lead us to the better or full use of technology: “We can’t just assume that being connected [via the net] solves these problems. If you let us work it out on our own, we tend to reinforce our own prejudices and stereotypes. . .” The tendency towards homophily in the selection of information is a fundamental aspect that individuals that use new media should be aware of, as a first step towards fighting it. But, although indeed some applications of web 2.0 tend to polarize and reinforce our opinions even more, the discussions about homophilous behavior online tend to take a very critical position and leave aside the fact that some web 2.0 applications specifically encourage divergence of ideas by allowing unrestricted feedback. Placing a posting on your blog or on a forum brings your ideas into the public sphere and automatically attracts opposite reactions by means of comments for example, pushing you towards expanding your comfort zone. Ethan Zuckermann is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society of the Harvard University, co-founder of Global Voices Online magazine. He is involved in several other projects that focus on the impact of technology on the developing world and the encouragement of bridge blogging (including people in developing nations in global dialogues). More sources: Why Internet is Making Me Stupid Homophily, serendipity, xenophilia Why Everyone You Know Thinks the Same as You [1] http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2007/12/19/social-software-serendipity-and-salad-bars-mmm-sybillance/ [2] http://www.contentious.com/2008/04/20/breaking-out-of-the-echo-chamber/ [3] http://www.contentious.com/2008/04/20/breaking-out-of-the-echo-chamber/ [4] http://www.contentious.com/2008/04/20/breaking-out-of-the-echo-chamber/
Today we are all enjoying this second step of the web evolution, the web 2.0, a read/write space where we can actively participate and create content by blogging, we can meet individuals that we would otherwise not have access to, by registering in social networks and creating online communities, and where we can use a lot of other interactive tools. The internet thus has the potential to largely expand our informational and relational capacities in a multitude of directions. Nevertheless, humans’ behaviour online seems to disregard the real capacities and potential of the internet. The behaviour of individuals online seems to be following an intrinsically human principle of behaviour that guides our actions in real life, defined by sociologists as homophily. Homophily refers to humans’ tendency to associate and connect with individuals similar to them in certain aspects, people who share their interests, values, culture, who have the same demographical, racial characteristics, etc., which leads to one of the main characteristics of a social network, which is homogeneity. This principle of homophily is the foundation of the most various human relations and networks, from marriage, to friendship, work, information exchange, and others. Homophily, a concept that can be expressed by the saying: birds of a feather flock together, plays an essential role in shaping our individual and collective view of the world. Sociologists acknowledge that “Homophily limits people’s social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience”. The same principle is guiding our behaviour online and there are several types of applications that exploit it. One example are online social networks. On Facebook, Hyves, MySpace, etc., individuals connect with other individuals that they know in real life, and with whom they presumably have common interests or other socio-demographical, behavioural, and intrapersonal characteristics, and then with the friends of their friends, and with potential friends that are automatically suggested to them by the application, based on common profile characteristics. Although the web 2.0 does amplify the broadening of our network with people whom it would be unlikely to meet in real life, it is said to also amplify the narrowing of our spectrum of knowledge in other fields, if our actions online are aimed only at reinforcing our own ideas, by, for example, registering in groups that share our interests or subscribing to feeds on a particular subject that we are interested in. Another type of online application that reflects well homophily, upon which Ethan Zuckerman drew attention in his presentation yesterday, are the media aggregators. Media aggregators are online applications that maintain subscription to feeds of media content coming from various sources: blogs, vlogs, etc. The content of these media aggregators is determined most of the times by user votes. It would not be surprising, if we were to analyze the profile of the users that are involved in the voting systems, that their profile is similar to ours, individuals who subscribe to feeds through these websites. And Zuckerman draws attention on this aspect in one of his interviews by raising a question: “If you look at sites like Digg and Reddit, these are sites that promised the future of journalism, where we would all get together and decide what’s important. …But that begs the question: Who’s ‘we?’”. And the answer to this question would be: people who have similar interests to ours. Zuckerman further develops this idea in another one of his declarations: “Cass Sunstein, an amazing legal scholar, says that one of the dangers of the internet is that we’re only hearing like voices, and that makes us more polarized […]. What’s incredible about the net is we have this opportunity to hear more voices than ever. But the tools we tend to build to it have us listening to the same voices again and again.” Zuckerman makes it clear that it is not the internet that is intrinsically wrong, but that individuals tend to use it in limitative ways: searching and selecting information and individuals mainly to reinforce their own ideas: “Encountering new ideas isn’t a supply problem in today’s internet - it’s a demand problem. There’s a near infinity of people unlike you creating content and putting it online for you to encounter. But it’s entirely possible that you’ll never encounter it if you don’t actively look for it… or unless the systems you use to find ideas start forcing you outside your usual orbits into new territories.” Zuckerman takes a strong position against homophily: “Homophily can make you really, really dumb”. He opposes to the effects of homophily another concept, serendipity: “Search in the future needs to lead us to people, to places, to voices. My hope is that in the future we get over homophily and we start looking for really productive serendipity - the sort of serendipity when you go to that shelf in the library and you think you know the book that you’re looking for, but you actually find the book you’re really looking for within 2-3 shelves of it. You think you’re looking for info on the US elections, but you end up finding info on how the Jamaicans are viewing the US elections. You think you’re looking for info on network security and you end up finding information on why Pakistan is so afraid of YouTube.”
On the other hand, homophily is seen as a good aspect by communication theorists from certain points of view because it facilitates communication. It eliminates communication barriers coming from various types of differences between individuals, that lead to misunderstandings or distortion of messages. It leads to effective communication, effective collaborations between individuals and collaborative development of ideas. The downside of homophily derives from the fact that, although we efficiently and “comfortably” communicate with like minded individuals, we have the tendency to avoid contacts that take us out of our “comfort” zone, which can be a field that we are not in control of, have few information about, or are unaware of: “We know so little about one another, and what we do know is generally so wrong, that our first instinct is to try to shut each other off.” Fighting the homophily instinct is an effort that will lead us to the better or full use of technology: “We can’t just assume that being connected [via the net] solves these problems. If you let us work it out on our own, we tend to reinforce our own prejudices and stereotypes. . .” The tendency towards homophily in the selection of information is a fundamental aspect that individuals that use new media should be aware of, as a first step towards fighting it. But, although indeed some applications of web 2.0 tend to polarize and reinforce our opinions even more, the discussions about homophilous behavior online tend to take a very critical position and leave aside the fact that some web 2.0 applications specifically encourage divergence of ideas by allowing unrestricted feedback. Placing a posting on your blog or on a forum brings your ideas into the public sphere and automatically attracts opposite reactions by means of comments for example, pushing you towards expanding your comfort zone. Ethan Zuckermann is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society of the Harvard University, co-founder of Global Voices Online magazine. He is involved in several other projects that focus on the impact of technology on the developing world and the encouragement of bridge blogging (including people in developing nations in global dialogues). More sources: Why Internet is Making Me Stupid Homophily, serendipity, xenophilia Why Everyone You Know Thinks the Same as You [1] http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2007/12/19/social-software-serendipity-and-salad-bars-mmm-sybillance/ [2] http://www.contentious.com/2008/04/20/breaking-out-of-the-echo-chamber/ [3] http://www.contentious.com/2008/04/20/breaking-out-of-the-echo-chamber/ [4] http://www.contentious.com/2008/04/20/breaking-out-of-the-echo-chamber/
A study of the University of Georgia describes as more likely to be narcissist those Facebook users who have a large number of friends and wallposts, narcissism in this case being defined as an emphasis on self-promotion and quantity of friends. The use of Facebook to emphasize self-promotion, that is considered to be narcissism in psychological studies of social network sites, is given another interpretation in a related discipline, sociology, who analyzes the individual’s identity in the context of symbolic social interactions with other individuals, as acts of dramaturgical performance, to use Goffman’s methodology.
Regularly in everyday life we shape our behaviour and appearance in order to determine and control the way that the others perceive us. This behaviour trend is part of what sociologists analyze as impression management. Much of the understanding of the process is attributed to the sociologist Erving Goffman and his book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), who conducted an innovative observational analysis of the component parts of the human interactional process from the theatrical performance perspective. Goffman focuses on a dramaturgical approach, and defines the individual as an actor, and his social interactions as dramaturgical performances shaped by environment and audience, aimed at creating specific impressions according to the desired purpose of the actor. The result is a “face”, a mask that varies according to the social situations. The face according to Goffman is “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact”. A face is therefore a successful staging of an identity.
Goffman’s analysis of social interactions as dramaturgical performances can be applied to humans’ social interactions online as part of social network sites (SNSes) as well. According to boyd, a social network site is a “web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system”. Thus, the concept of a SNS, is to create a micro-society centred around the user, offering him the possibility to link with other users, in Goffman’s terms, offering the user, the actor, a stage where he can perform in order to model his identity. The SNS stage, the webpage, is divided in three regions, in Goffman’s terminology: “front”, “back”, and “outside”, according to the relationship of the audience to the performance. The audience has access to the front stage of the performance, to the information that the actors want to display. On Facebook the frontstage is comprised of the profile page, which displays personal information about the user, the wallpostings, the friend network and the photos. The backstage is reserved to the actor only, in Facebook this being the information available only for the actor after login in, such as the inbox, for example. To be “outside” the stage means to have no access to the performance, which is the case of users of the same SNS who are not “friends” of the actor.
The segregation between audience and non-audience ensures optimal results of the performance in impression creation. Specific performances must be given to specific audiences, in order for the actor to be able to deliver the right front (face) to match each audience and preserve proper relationships in interaction.
An optimal segregation would prevent the bringing together of different publics, for example work colleagues, school mates and family for the same performance, which would be sensed as an intrusion and would cause problems to the actor, as boyd also notes, tendency often noticed in humans’ everyday life. The segregation within audience becomes problematic in some of the SNSes. For example, in Facebook there is only one category of public, the so-called “friends”, which does not correspond to the denotation of the term according to boyd, and brings together different categories of public for the same audience, which leads to the inconvenience of staging one face, one presentation for all types of audiences: family, friends, colleagues. The non-segregation policy is stated in the website description: “Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them”. There are SNSes though that are constructed on the principle of audience segregation, as for example LinkedIn, which is a network for professional to establish connections with other professionals
Another inconvenience as far as crossing the boundaries of typical regions of social interaction, is that the internet blurs the distinction between frontstage and backstage, which leads to concerns about privacy and abuse of personal information online. danah boyd notes as a consequence of these concerns the doubtful quality and truth of profiles, in light of the fact that a personal profile is public.
Another concept of Goffman, the face, develops specific tools within SNSes. An actor within an SNS can make use of different tools to create his face, a mask that changes according to the actor’s role, the audience and the social interaction. Facebook for example offers a series of tools: social network profile (SNP), made up from cultural signs: favourite books, movies, etc., the wall and the friends network. Donath and boyd speak of friends as part of the online performance of self: “a user’s friend connections speak to their identity—the public display of friend connections constitutes a social milieu that contextualizes one’s identity. The act of “friending” others, and choosing the subset of these friends to display in the so-called “Top 8,” constitute identity performances, because they are willful acts of context creation”.
Actors can develop two types of faces: a positive face shows the desire to be appreciated, approved, etc., and a negative face is the desire to preserve autonomy of self, not to be imposed upon or intruded. Researchers that examined the patterns of gendered identity, discovered that “females tend to turn to others for validation in contrast to males, who are more apt to maintain their individuality and whose relationships are more of an extension of their already-complete selves”. In the light of this finding, it can be stated that females are more likely to develop a positive face on SNSes as well, and males a negative one.
The performance is the process of social interaction that has as a result the creation of a face. Any performance tends towards idealization, either positive or negative. The positive idealization can be interpreted as narcissism in psychology, by emphasis on self-promotion. Performance on SNSes like Facebook is focused on the demonstration of the actor’s social competence in presentation of self, and establishing interactions online, in which association with popular or attractive users is an important tool of identity definition.
A more in-depth analysis of SNSes using Goffman’s methodology may lead to a better understanding of online social interactions and the ways they differ from everyday interactions, due to the mediation of the technological platform. From this brief interpretation, one can conclude that SNSes are online stages which allow actors to emphasize their social network of relations, using their audience for self-promotion purposes. The limitations of an SNS like Facebook, following Goffman’s description of dramaturgical performance, come from the fact that the user is compelled to display only one face to a variety of audiences simultaneously, which results in a “cynical” performance in Goffman’s terms, or an untruthful profile in boyd’s terms, due to the incapacity to more accurately define and segregate the audience. A cynical performance is also the result of privacy concerns and abuse of personal information online.
Bibliography:
Goffman, Erving, Viata cotidiana ca spectacol, translation of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Comunicare.ro, Bucharest, 2003
Goffman Erving, in Lemert & Branaman, The Goffman Reader, www.googlebooks.co.uk/the_goffman_reader,
danah boyd and Nicole Ellison (2007, October). “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13 (1), article 11
As technologies develop, media diversifies its platforms and products, and becomes more and more present and involved in our lives, building barthesian myths around every object surrounding us, which consequently turns our every act: production, purchasing, consumption, etc., into a cultural experience. But the changes that media has been undergoing due to the development of new technologies, have turned not only the media practitioners but also the media consumers into creators of culture. This phenomena, called convergence culture is one of the main factors of change in the nature and practice of media today, that shape the analysis that Mark Deuze, Assistant Professor of Telecommunications at Indiana University and Professor of Journalism and New Media at Leiden University, presents in the book Media Work.
The main focus of the book is the media practitioner and how his work and life style are being changed by new social, cultural, economical and technological developments, that give birth to new paradigms, such as convergence culture (Henry Jenkins) or liquid life (Zygmunt Bauman), which Deuze uses in order to explain the changing nature of media work. The media work is described as a very complex reality, a mix of sometimes contradictory elements that need to work towards convergence: “content, connectivity, creativity and commerce” (Deuze). The collapse of the power system determined by the dissolving distinction between the traditional well established roles and relations between producer and audience, which characterizes the convergence media culture, as well as the consequences of this new pattern of behavior on individual life, which results in a convergence of all aspects of existence, enumerated by Deuze as: “work (production), life (consumption) and play”, determines some of the current features of working in the media.
Thanks to this mirror of the media work, that Deuze’s analysis creates, the book is a useful guide for anyone interested in working in the media, for example, for media students that want to know what to expect and what is expected from them as media practitioners, and for media professionals who want to have a critical view on their work environment, in order to better understand and adapt to the changes that the industry is going through. The main question that this book answers: What does working in the media really mean and how does it look like to work in the media?, receives a comprehensive yet rather discouraging answer. The insecurity, fragmentation, precariousness, exploitation, especially in the case of new comers, that characterizes working in the media these days, due partly to the globalization of production and outsourcing, is far from the dreams, expectations and enthusiasm with which media students prepare to enter the industry.
What makes the book very actual and practical is that the data sources for Deuze’s analysis are from within the industry: practitioners’ blogs, publications, interviews with media professionals from various parts of the world: Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States, from four key fields of the creative industry: advertising (including public relations and marketing communication), journalism, film and television production, and game design and development.
The book is divided in eight chapters, starting with an overview of the main theoretical paradigms, such as convergence culture and liquid modernity, and the macro-factors: social, technological, cultural, etc., that influence life and work styles in the media industry nowadays, and continuing in separate chapters with an analysis of the institutional, technological, organizational and cultural aspects that determine the work style of professionals engaged in creative industries, in the four main fields mentioned above. Leaving aside the differences that may come from the different products, missions, audiences, technological tools, locations, etc., the media practitioners involved in all these fields seem to be facing nowadays the same challenges that result from the convergence culture. The media practitioners seem to find it difficult today to define their audience and preserve it, as the audience empowered by technology switched from the status of passive receiver towards active producer of media content. Each discipline and practitioner seems to find their own ways to cope with it, and the ones most willing to let go of power and control, both as far as content and the used medium are concerned, and to actively share the creative power with their audience in what is called participatory media, seem to have most to win from the current situation, in Deuze’s opinion. This tendency can be most noticed in the game design and development industry.
Deuze does a good job at describing today’s media reality and the new work style pattern, which promotes flexibility, project-based work, multi-skilling, soft-skills, rotational work style, informal networking, in various proportions according to the industry, in what seems to be a transition period from the clearly defined unequal relations of power from the time of traditional mass media, towards the convergence media culture and the new power relations, that are in course of negotiation today. He leaves the picture a bit blurry though, as far as future tendencies are concerned. Is today’s insecurity and fragmentation the new media reality or just a transitory stage towards a new reality? Where will the current negotiation of power between creator and audience lead? Will we still be able to distinguish between the two categories in the near future? We hope the author will share more of his visions in a future book.
Media Work was first published by Polity Press in 2007, as part of the Digital Media and Society Series and is available for purchase on amazon.com at a convenient price.
I started a brief research on the blogging activity in Romania, as I am already thinking to focus on one or some specific New Media applications in Romania as subject of my master dissertation. I found out that in April 2007 there were about 30 000 Romanians that were blogging, according to some statistics results that were published in an online version of a Romanian newspaper. I would say that the number is relatively large considering that at the end of last year there were only around 7 million internet users within Romania according to another online version of a Romanian newspaper, out of a population of approximately 21.6 millions. Besides the most common uses of blogs: to publicly express personal experiences and feelings, to present news with a personal touch, to display entertaining content such as in jokes, links to videos on YouTube, to create image if you’re already in the public sphere (for e.g. politicians), etc., I discovered some uses of Romanian blogs that impressed me. On various blogs there are occasionally organized fund raising campaigns aimed at causes related to the blog’s content, such as a campaign to collect books for orphans, organised by a cultural blog. But an even more developed path than this random initiatives of fund-raising through New Media applications that I was impressed to discover, was an attempt to offer Romanian NGOs some basic theoretical but mostly methodological knowledge about the use of New Media in order to help accomplish the mission of their organization. That’s how a blog about blogging that serves advocacy purposes of NGOs was born: www.blONG.eu. Remarkable as I find the initiative, as a New Media student, I can’t help wondering how suitable specialists in old media or journalism are for offering training in Web 2.0 applications.
23 years old, graduate in the field of Communication and Public Relations, I spent most of my life in Romania, where I experimented almost all the possible fields where PR can be applied: governmental, non-profit, corporate. I also had short collaborations with the media, just to take a glimpse of what's going on on the other side of the fence. All these professional experiments gave me a clue of how my life is going to look life if I stay in Romania. The picture was quite dull and exhausting, therefore after a few years of work and study I decided I need a vacation. A long one, far away. That's when I came up with the idea of experimenting studying abroad, and ended up in Maastricht last year.
Therefore the New Media master is not my first study in the Netherlands, although this new UvA experience feels so different: a higher degree of engagement and responsibility. The fun days of social networking and sightseeing trips of the Erasmus exchange programme last year, that also helped me discover Netherlands' academic potential, are over. I am now faced with a new type of experience which I very much welcome, a highly demanding academic experience that will hopefully broaden my knowledge and academic research abilities. In trying to cope with my newest challenge, the New Media master, this blog was born.
