My Digital Media Digital Media Essay

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Digital Media: My Digital Media

My Digital Media: Digital Media

Digital media has changed our lives in immense ways at both the personal and professional levels. Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have made it possible for us to connect and interact with friends, family, and experts in our respective fields. This text examines the role of digital media in my personal and professional life, as well as its role in shaping the youth culture.

Digital media has, and continues to play a crucial role in our personal and professional lives. On a personal scale, we are able to connect and stay in touch with family, friends and loved ones located miles away. Moreover, these people are able to take an active role in our lives and share in our most memorable moments through the pictures, videos and updates that we share on social networking sites. Besides personal communication, we are also able to connect and network with hiring managers and professionals in our respective fields. This gives us an opportunity to build healthy professional networks and develop ourselves career-wise. Moreover, social media plays a huge role in shaping our culture and how we interact with each other. Our language, norms, and beliefs are shaped, to a significant extent, by digital media, particularly social networking sites. This text expounds on the role of digital media in our personal and professional lives. It also examines how such media shapes the youth culture.

My Digital Media

The internet has made it possible for information to travel faster across the globe, making the world a small connected village. Digital media has drastically changed how we communicate and interact with each other, particularly with the increasing popularity of social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Before the invention of social media, our means to interact with others were limited, and we were restricted largely to interacting with those people that we know in-person. There were things that people in generations X and Y had to deal with, but which Millennials and those born after the invention of the internet do not have to grapple with -- waiting a week or more for pictures that you sent off to be developed or waiting for weeks for a letter in the mail. The internet, and particularly social media has changed, on a large scale, the way people conduct their activities, interact, and communicate with each other. It has influenced our personal lives just as much as it has our professional and business lives. This text examines how digital media has changed my personal and professional life, and how it continues to shape the youth culture, which I am part of.

Digital Media in my Personal Life

One of the greatest benefits of social media is its ability to keep me connected with friends and loved ones regardless of geographical boundaries. These platforms make it possible for me to share exciting news about my life and details about my day through videos, pictures, and statuses. This gives family living miles away a chance to be part of my life without making long-distance phone calls or applying for a plane ticket. For me, Facebook is the best platform for this purpose, combining videos, photos and statuses to help people share their lives with others. In simple terms, social media helps to keep family and friends together and in each other's lives, even when they are miles apart.

Social media networks also offer ample platforms for people to network and have a sense of belonging when they move to new locations. In this age of globalization, geographical boundaries are losing significance, and liberalization is making it possible for people to work and transact in localities outside their home localities. I, personally, can relate to this -- there was this time we had to move to a new state owing to work-related commitments on my parents' part. It was difficult leaving all my childhood friends behind and starting to create new friends and associates in a new environment, school and totally different neighborhood. Social media networks, however, made the networking bit rather easy for me. Using hash-tags for my new city and school on Twitter, I was able to connect instantly with people talking about or sharing information about my new place of residence. This gave me a sense of belonging, and made it possible for me to engage with others on specific issues or concerns affecting my new city.

On a personal front, I feel that social media also does a lot to boost my self-esteem.

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Subrahmanyam and Smahel (2010) were able to show, in their analysis, that in line with the social compensation hypothesis, people with self-esteem issues can use social media platforms to compensate for their shortcomings, making friends and self-disclosing in ways that would otherwise not be possible. Supporting this argument, Shackford (2011) posits that this is because such sites allow less-socially adept persons to put their best face forward. They are able to reveal only those aspects that they feel reflect positively about themselves, while filtering anything that may reflect badly (Shackford, 2011). Moreover, feedback from friends and followers posted publicly on other people's profiles often tends to be positive, which provides a further boost to one's self-esteem.

My use of digital media is, however, not without its share of negative benefits. I, for instance, feel that my increased use of social media and computer-mediated communication has impacted negatively on my social skills. Because of my dependency on social media, I am finding it increasingly difficult to interact with people in-person or carry on a normal face-to-face conversation.

Digital Media in my Professional Life

Digital media provides platforms through which individuals can get their names out professionally (Ferriden, Ramsden & Sheninger, 2012). LinkedIn, for instance, played a huge role in getting me into my current job -- I built a profile that made it able for me to link up with hiring managers in my field, and even after I got invited for an interview, I found time to connect and network with professionals inside and outside the organization in question to obtain a view of what the interview would be like, what kind of questions to expect, and what it would be like working for the company.

In addition, Facebook and Twitter provide ample means for individuals to network and develop professionally (Ferriden et al., 2012). Facebook, for instance, offers an extensive array of tools, including Events, Business pages, and Facebook groups that allow individuals to build their professional contacts, build new relationships, network and interact with experts, and stay at par with significant events related to their fields of work. Moreover, Events keep one informed about the latest opportunities happening around them, which they could attend for better networking.

Finally, digital media exposes one to a large number of people and a wider array of hiring managers. Job seekers are no longer limited to their geographical locations -- through Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, one has access to millions of potential employers, regardless of their geographical location (Acar, 2014). This larger network of potential employers presents better opportunities for individuals to grow professionally and move up the career ladder.

Digital Media and the Youth Culture

In his book, Couldry (2012) suggests that digital media particularly social media, plays a huge role in shaping culture; that is, what people of a particular group believe, their language, and how they associate and interact with each other. Culture is depicted by, among other things, how we converse and communicate with each other (Acar, 2014). Social media shapes youth's language in the following ways:

Writing is Summarized: young people spend most of their time on social networking sites, most of which have character limits for updates posted. Twitter, for instance, has a 140 character limit, prompting users to learn the art of passing messages across in very few words. This has allowed shorter paragraphs and sentences, with less focus on correct grammar use.

Abbreviation Use: young people communicating on digital media and social networking sites speak a new language entirely that may be incomprehensible to non-users. Abbreviations are a common component of youth's language. Abbreviations such as TTYL (Talk to You Later), Lol (laugh out loud), ROFL (Rolling on the floor laughing) are a more or less natural aspect of young people's language today. This is not the case with earlier generations, whose members are not so inclined to internet and social media use.

Besides language, there is also the issue interpersonal relationships. Facebook and Twitter, the two most commonly-used social media platforms, provide options for 'unfriending' or 'unfollowing' people who do not subscribe to one's opinion or point-of-view. Young people, who are also frequent users of these platforms, have thus developed a culture of following and identifying only with those people who share the same interests and opinions as themselves. This has bred a culture of not being ready to accept dissenting opinions, or views that differ from one's own.

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