Hello. This is my first blog ever. I only started this for university purposes but lets see where this goes. Today, I pretty much wasted my day. To me, a productive day is spending hours doing uni work and bettering myself in some form. I didn’t really do that. I had every intention of waking up early to go for a run, ride Thowra (my horse) and practice Spanish. Instead, I woke up to Carol scratching on my door. I let her in and she jumped on my bed, curled up and went to sleep. Lets be real. I couldn’t leave that cute fluffiness to go do my boring human chores. So I abandoned all sense of motivation to sleep in with my overly comfortable cat.
I was rudely awakened by a group conference call I had to attend. I then went back to sleep. I woke up an hour to later to browse some of the Black Friday Sales – got bored then went back to sleep. I wasn’t getting up unless she was. It is very rare I catch the Carol in a cute, cuddly and sleepy mood so I just had to savor the precious moment.
Lunch time came around. I went to my local pub with my cousin and her 2 year old named Maxim’Fox. Interesting name I know. It has fox incorporated into it so I like it, foxes are cute. I had a pet one called Vulpix when I was 17. That was when that song ‘What does the fox say’ took off. I felt important because I actually knew the sound foxes make. Gabrielle and I both devoured our avocado chickens and I gave them some cute AF xmas presents. She’s obsessed with lion king so I gifted her merch. Maxim needs to be introduced to Pokemon so I gifted him a Vulpix plush. He will forever remind me of the Pokemon Vulpix and my pet Fox purely because of his name. It doesn’t help that he has strawberry blonde hair.
I got home to an Instagram message from an old friend asking to go for a horse ride. I felt anti-social and lazy so I lied and told her I was doing adult tasks in town. Instead I just listened to Joe Rogan podcasts and started internally dreading the task of formatting this website. I attempted it a few days ago with zero luck. I got shitty with it and ditched the idea. Thankfully I am getting the hang of it. I hope it doesn’t look too ugly to readers.
In short, my day was spent procrastinating. I seem to work better when I procrastinate all day and then start my uni work at night. Such a night owl. Anyway, adios.
I chose to answer the question alluding to the positive and negative impacts social media can have in contemporary politics. I structured the podcast script so that the four examples were divided into positive and negative categories. Positive examples discussed were Kim Kardashian’s impact on The First Step Act and the #BlackLivesMatter movement. I then talked about the negatives impact social media can have on politics. The examples I used were the reactions to Greta Thunberg and Kevin Rudd on social media. My biggest strategy was to rely on the most significant calls to political change that I had remembered being impacted by via social media. I then researched these events more thoroughly and added my own connotations to them.
I structured my entire podcast script around my research. I felt it was important to use real examples to back up the positive and negative impacts social media has on garnering political change. I made sure I visited the official sites for each of my examples to draw upon real and accurate information about the political movements. After having the base and concrete information, I then researched the influence each had through social media and why this came to be. I also explored which celebrities and/or people of influence supported them. My biggest fear was referencing inaccurate information from celebrity driven articles, hence why I heavily focused on political facts. I set out my research in an essay format to avoid making mistakes. The topic, the evidence, my analysis and then the link. This kept my podcast from delving from the facts.
Drawing from core information sources such as official websites, Twitter and Instagram feeds, news sites and even a scholarly source, I was able to put the most important information into dot points. I evaluated the information and then chose the most effective examples and facts for my podcast. After the process of elimination, I then began the process of writing up a podcast script. I made sure that the script was informative but also had a humanly conversational quality to it too. To create the intro and outro music, I made a free account for the website Soundtrap. The website has a range of beats, sounds and rhythms that you can compile together to make your own unique soundtrack. I had a lot of fun with this and was able to produce a theme that suited the nature of Carol Chronicles. The process was easy, and I did not have to stress about infringing upon copyright laws because the entire program is free.
The process of script writing was probably my most difficult challenge. At the beginning of the process, I had so many examples that I wanted to incorporate into my script. I fully researched these examples and had written them out in a podcast conversational format before realising I had wasted my time. My podcast was way too long. After timing myself read the script I realised that the podcast went for 8 minutes rather than the 4-6 minutes. I know that the assessment instructions said that it is very easy to go overtime, but I never thought it was that easy. The process of eliminating segments from my podcast was difficult because I felt that they were all very good examples. Writing the script to meet the time restrictions was a challenge. I found that the most successful resolution to the issue was simply trial and error. Repeating the process of recording myself and trimming down the script was an effective way in resolving the problem.
Hello. So, I originally wanted to make the theme of my blog about my daily life with Carol. After some reflection, I decided to redirect the angle of my platform from boring diary like entries, to blogs that focus on gaming culture.
I am still learning how to form and maintain online connections, and admittedly it is quite difficult. My focus is to follow various public relations accounts on Twitter that specialise in consulting pop culture and gaming companies. I hope this will help me understand their campaigns and evaluate who they prioritise as clients. Following major gaming companies such as Nintendo is a huge priority because their employees often interact with their tweets. This should allow me the opportunity to engage with the employees of influential companies. My objective is to form connections with them. They may even be interested in my blog. My following is small, but I am not disheartened. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
As I navigate Twitter, I am learning that my preferred interaction style with gamers and gaming companies is through shared humor. Many games have inside jokes that only fans understand. I have started retweeting and replying to such threads because I think it is an engaging way to appear reachable and likeable. I have had some positive interactions with fellow gamers using this method.
Sheograth turned me into a man because I was a little bit funny when he was a kid https://t.co/VFyguNIjbb
Another way I communicate on Twitter is by navigating the ‘explore’ tab to see what’s trending. I often weigh in on trending video game topics to interact with my specific audience. But sometimes, I must go beyond gaming to increase interaction.
My goal is to establish online identity with positive interactions. I am determined not to repeat my mistakes of the past by associating my online presence with toxic behaviour.
My most significant past experience with online identity occurred almost 10 years ago. It was 2010, and immaturity stepped in the way of my ability to strategically and positively engage with the online gaming community. 14-year old me had joined an online clan called ‘murder666’ for the PlayStation 3 game ‘Resident Evil 5’. The clan was governed by an African-American man who would wave a handgun around on a webcam group chat full of underage girls. He would bark orders on which rival clan to verse, which game matches to record and what humiliating videos to create about rivals on YouTube. Since I sucked so badly at playing, my job was to troll people on fake accounts to get a reaction out of them. Here is a video someone recorded of me doing exactly that. Warning – it contains explicit language.
While I was well-liked in my strange gang-like clan, I had a strong following of haters. For good reason too. The online community of RE5 was full of hateful angry gamers who loved versing enemy clans. It was a good day if you had recorded an enemy clan member losing, put stupid music to the clip and uploaded it to YouTube ready for their humiliation.
Irresponsible online gaming
My fixation of elevating my social status within the online clan was a problem. I was immature and hurt myself and others by focusing too much on an online identity rather than my real-life identity. This experience in the gaming community was a huge eye-opener for me. I never realised that negative social media experiences could stem from online gaming. Here are some of the negative impacts I experienced:
1.I was seriously addicted.
I would race home after school to play online. Normally I’d start playing from 4pm and finish up at 12am. I neglected homework, sport and exercise just so I could play (Siddiqui and Singh, 2016).
2. It affected my behaviour.
I became so wound up in humiliating people online that I started to forget about my own life. I was moody, angry and withdrawn if I couldn’t play online for even one day (Siddiqui and Singh, 2016).
3.I started invading people’s privacy.
I was so fixated on humiliating rival members of my clan that I started finding their personal Facebook pages. I would take the most unflattering photo of them and incorporate the images into my YouTube videos (Siddiqui and Singh, 2016).
Moving forward, I only focus on positive online interactions. I do not reply or engage in any unacceptable behavior and I certainly will not be joining any online clans again.
Carol Chronicles 