“Online communities are valuable information sources where knowledge is accumulated by interactions between people” (Seo, Croft and Smith, 2009). Having central unifying values, interacting and participating within a conversation and the sense of a shared experience, are three main defining factors of what makes a community.
As a musician, I love being connected to my fans and I used my already established artist page and fan base on Facebook, as my main online platform to complete this assessment. On all my social media accounts, I am the leader of my own community. Similarly to my blog, I write and share things that I think my audience want to read and/or watch. Whether it’s my own images, videos and links, or something I’ve found inspiring in the hope to inspire my followers, I always ensure that the content reflects who I am as an artist, but at the same time, the content is appropriate for what I’m trying to achieve – and that’s having a fan base that looks up to me, loves what I do and what I share with them. I want them to be entertained and feel inspired. Knowing what they think of the content is also really important to me, and so I try my best to give them what they want.
As Murphie and Potts (2003) says, ‘technology is the age of social change’. It allows users to connect with others in the cyber space and create a community that would not have existed in the real world. I feel that this is most evident in Instagram and Facebook. Not only is social media a place for entertainment purposes, but it also enables society to stay connected, voice their opinions and promote themselves online (Oatway, 2012). For this assessment, I decided to go with using Instagram, Facebook and Youtube as my online platforms to release content, as I felt more connected with these communities on a personal level.
I initially posted a photo on my Instagram account announcing that I would be sharing a new cover with everyone. My addition of a unique hashtag (#CaitlinMinFaMusic) allows me to target my specific community by, in a way, ‘categorising’ my content, whilst simultaneously being part of a bigger community – either way, forming network literacy.
Sharing the image on both Instagram and Facebook, the two platforms enabled me to reach a greater audience. When I finally released my new cover video on Facebook, I was overwhelmed with the response. I received a plethora of likes, comments, 3 shares and amazingly even had friends tagging other friends – sparking conversation. The ability for people to react with emojis has also effected the way my community communicated.
Furthermore, I embedded another form of network literacy by linking the video from my YouTube account into the post. This third platform encouraged me to broaden and target an even larger audience. I didn’t get a response as big as I did on Facebook, but I was still able to encourage participation and interactivity with likes, comments and new subscribers.
The ability for something like my video to spread into different communities and get the response that it did, shows how advanced technology has become. Due to receiving this immense amount of support over all three online communities, I therefore believe my contributions were successful. Social media has become a platform for connecting to people all over the world with similar interests, which is why the tool is so powerful.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Murphie, A. and Potts, J. 2012, ‘Culture and Technology’, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print. pg. 11-38
Oatway, J. 2012, ‘Mastering Story, Community and Influence : How to Use Social Media to Become a Socialeader’, Wiley, Hoboken, pg. 97-109
Seo, J. Croft, B. and Smith, D. 2009, ‘Online community search using thread structure’, in David Cheung, Il-Yeol Song, Wesley Chu, Xiaohua Hu and Jimmy Lin (ed.) Proceedings of the ACM 18th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2009), New York, USA, pp. 1907-1910.
Caitlin Min Fa 