HELPING PEOPLE'S

By Cheryl Jadav, student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster Watch the video here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxn4HjbTfYU If you’re reading this, obviously, you follow social media! Has politics and political democracy fascinated you? Do you wonder what impacts and what role does social media play, not only in our routinely life but in something as important and broad as politics and democracy? The interview with Dr. Dan Mercea of City University London highlights the importance of social media in participatory politics. As he suggests, ‘Social Media is an instrument’ that supports democracy. As Dan Mercea puts in, the book is a ‘fairly dated collection in internet time’. A collection based on a conference held in 2011, this book is for those who are interested in studying the internet and social media, politics and democracy. Over the last couple of years, we have seen our social networks being flooded by the updates on the political occurrences thro...

By Abdullah Anees , student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster Watch the video here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz2l-6yUHbg At the beginning of our semester we were asked by our teacher Christian Fuchs to write a book review. The book had to be an academic reflection on social media. So I went away and searched for books by authors I could interview face to face. I came across ‘Writing on the wall’ by Tom Standage, the digital editor of The Economist. In “Writing on the wall”, he argues how the concept of social media initially dates back to the Roman Period one century BC. He took me on an historical journey throughout time and highlighted how concepts of social media played roles throughout history. From Cicero ’s letters to Luther’s pamphlets to the modern day revolutions, Tom Standage discusses how sharing ideas that spread have had influences throughout time. After reading the book I can actually say looking back at history from a social media pe...

By Keurkoon Phoomwittaya, student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster Watch the video here:  https://vimeo.com/90989359 In the early days of social interaction on the Internet I tried out different identities with avatars and used pseudonyms in virtual worlds. I learned and shared ideas in online forums that I was interested in such as Hamster Lovers society or the Thai fiction writers community. Nowadays, social media enterprises such as Facebook attract more people to spend their time on the platforms. At any time and on the move we can simulate ourselves to feel as if we were connected together and close with each other. The little mobile devices in our pockets shape and affect how we think about ourselves and relationships with others. Because of my interest in such topics I became curious to read the book “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other” by Sherry Turkle. I made a documentary based on the issues that her boo...

By Tianzhang Zhao, student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster Watch the video here!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f-tJ3G5uRg This video I produced is an interview with David Gauntlett and Simon Lindgren talking about the book ‘Making is Connecting’. David Gauntlett is the author of this work. He is a sociologist and media theorist and works for University of Westminster in UK. Simon Lindgren is a sociologist as well, and a social media researcher, who works for Umeå University in Sweden. The video is about 30 minutes long and is divided into 9 parts: The first part is about the relationship between making things, individuals’ happiness, and society. In this book, David Gauntlett promotes that making things would reflect and realize individuals’ values, which would bring people happiness and would further influence society as a whole in a positive way. Therefore, this section is focused on the question if ‘making things’ can raise individuals’ happiness...

By María Belén Conti , student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster. I have directed a movie about the collected volume “Media, Surveillance and Identity” that has been edited by Andr é Jansson and Miyase Christensen. Watch the video interview here!  https://vimeo.com/91504300 As early as 1995, John Thompson was talking of a world of “mediated visibility” in which technology was a double-edged sword, since it allowed the few people in power positions to control the many, but also empowered the many to control those few. Since then, many things have changed, with the Internet growing in importance as well as with the appearance of a new actor: social media. In these social and networked spaces, private and public communications merge and the invisible turns visible. It is no longer easy to maintain the private sphere private and unintended audiences may reach any message we send. But these unintended audiences that have access to our communications are not o...

By Barrie Schooling, student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster Watch the video interview here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3u4CyVStk4 Google ‘Twitter book review’ and you’ll get reviews of 1,000 page tomes reduced to 140 characters, for example “ The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Beautiful and thought provoking novel of love, obsession, lust and oppression". This sort of activity, indeed every sort of activity on Twitter from the profound to the banal are the subject of a book called ‘Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age’ by Dhiraj Murthy. Having recently written a review of the book I arranged to interview Dhiraj in his Goldsmiths lab and chat to him a bit more about his work and to ask questions that might help to me critically review his work. In ‘Twitter. Social communication in the Twitter age’ Dhiraj Murthy discusses the platform as it gives ‘ordinary’ people a medium to publish ‘user-generated “news/updates”, Twitter is a ‘soci...

Zhao, Tianzhang  is a student in the  Social Media MA at the University of Westminster. Social media helped to generate energy and mobilize a community of support in the U.S. presidential election in 2008, which helped Barack Obama to achieve popularity (Jue, et al., 2010). According to Jue and his colleagues (2010), this fervor of political influence would be of particular value to any community activist, no matter their political beliefs or organizational affiliation. If this were true what would this mean for organisational management? Most organisations seek to engage employees, clients, customers, suppliers and partners in an effort to achieve brand loyalty to their products and services. However, in today’s world political and business leaders cope with increasingly difficult circumstances in achieving these objectives (Jue, et al., 2010). What to do? Well, social media is a useful platform for leaders to construct and share their strategic goals in a relatively effici...

Abdullah Anees   is a student in the  Social Media MA at the University of Westminster. Two things I am very fond of are social media and sports, and what better way to relate the two in modern day then a reflective blog on how one influences the other. As we all know, social media platforms have allowed people to voice their opinions with others worldwide. The difference in a message being shared from any individual to the larger audience has developed at a furious pace since the development of Web 2.0. We now see people, such as athletic celebrities, who we were once accustomed to only seeing on the TV, now becoming vocal on social media platforms. It seems stars are taking their views more public rather than leaving that up to their publicists. Twitter, Facebook and various other social media platforms have allowed athletes to more readily reach out to their fans to establish a common connection. This common connection is the will to express their opinions and views; they n...

María Belén Conti is a student in the Social Media MA at the University of Westminster. As a journalist, I usually find myself in a difficult situation when it comes to social media: would it affect my job opportunities if I openly express my opinion of certain topics online as my friends do? Should I always be professional because if anything personal is filtered I will lose my credibility (major asset for a journalist)? Some may say that the best solution is to have two different profiles, one for personal and other professional proposes ( EFE, 2011 ; Restrepo, 2012 ). But again, the personal profile is there and the chance of information, opinions or photos filtering to audiences we don’t want to reach is still high. “You have one identity...The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly... Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity”, said Mark Z...

Akin Olaniyan is a student in the Social Media MA at the University of Westminster.   Making sense of the obvious tension between online visibility and privacy is never going to be a straightforward thing for me. Having worked as a reporter and a corporate communication specialist for more than two decades, I have some sense of dealing with public scrutiny of my work. Until now, social media was just for me another platform.  If you know newspapers, I used to think, you shouldn’t have problems functioning in the new environment that digital convergence has created. Or so I thought. Just weeks after arriving for the Social Media MA at Westminster University , I have come to agree with danah boyd that being visible through social media can both complicate and enrich our lives (boyd, 2012). Social media networking sites like Facebook and Twitter offer new ways of engagement that have collapsed the walls of privacy, sometimes with terrible consequences. Henry Jenkins captures thi...