Unit 2: My thoughts on the Course- Emergent Media

I see this course, Emergent Media, as a great opportunity to learn more in depth about the things I already know with the media and today’s world. I think this class will also help me expand on my skills as a Mass Communications student and journalist. Additionally, this class has already provided me with the first steps and basic knowledge of networking, which is great. By the end of this course I plan to continue use the social media accounts I was required to create for the course and the things I’ve learned and will learn, to position myself as a professional and presentable to job opportunities. I have never taken an online course, so it is also a cool experience how to work from my computer and learn the ways of school from online. I have also never made a blog, posted blogs, and read blogs at a minimum, so that is something new for me that I am excited to work with. I find the two units we covered so far to be very interesting and have come across many intriguing facts and statistics in the class’s book. For example in chapter one, the following study really grabbed my attention, “There are now 2.4 billion internet users worldwide, and they send and receive 300 billion e-mail messages every day; users of Twitter generate 500 million tweets per day; and Facebook reports that 100 million photos are uploaded each and every day”(Potter). Wow! Reading those statistics along with some other ideas in the text made me take a step back and realize that our society today really is revolved around technology and our everyday media. With that being said, it makes perfect sense to obtain as much information possible about media and use it to benefit myself as a student and person of today’s generation. I feel this class can provide me with these techniques. In the introduction to this course we read and watched about the idea that our brains have “automatic routines” and when it comes to social media, we filter out what we want to see and hear and what we don’t. The way this course expanded on that idea seemed that it was approached from some scientific and psychological standpoints which was also very absorbing to me and showed me that this course will teach me a lot.