Emerging Media

Hello all! I just wanted to post a quick update on my current inactivity. I recently had a second wedding up in Maine so my husband and I were on vacation for nearly two weeks. It was a blast and it was so great to see our families! We originally married May 15, 2017 with just our parents and a few family members so we decided to hold a second ceremony and reception in my husband's home state. The majority of my family lives in the Northeast part of the US as well so it just made sense. Anyways... I plan to get back into the swing of things and become active here again soon. I just have to wait until I've pulled myself out of the post-vacation blues. See you all soon!

A few minutes ago, I downloaded three more weather radar apps onto my iPhone X. Why? Well, I am lucky enough and unlucky enough to life 20 feet from the Sound in the Florida Panhandle. We are in a condominium complex where the bottom floor if all storage units, then my floor, and the top floor with only 14 total units. I love my home and the fact that it is on a dead end next to a bird sanctuary, but hurricane season brings inevitable anxiety that makes me question why I chose to live here. Let me be more specific; I wonder why my husband chose to live here and I went along with it. Anyone who has gone house shopping with a spouse can probably relate to one of the two of you being very particular and picky about what they want in a home. Don’t get me wrong, I get it. You are spending every day in this place for the foreseeable future and it is where you will raise and/or take care of your family. For us our family consists of two cats, two dogs, and of course the two of us so we didn...

When someone uses the phrase "safety drill" many people think of years in middle and high school getting their eardrums shattered by the fire alarm, then standing in 90-degree Florida heat for 45 minutes while teachers counted. Or, for fellow Florida public school graduates they may think of tornado safety drills where we sat hunched over and staring at a wall in the hallway. As kids, even seniors in high school, we never seemed to take these drills seriously – except the tornado drill when there was severe weather looming. I personally have a very real phobia when it comes to tornadoes, I think I watched Twister one too many times in my formative years. But, for Internet users of more recent years, they may think of safety drills referred to as “lockdown drills”. These drills were to keep students (and teachers) safe from any hostile intruder on campus. I was very lucky and only experienced this in a real-life scenario once, as a junior in high school, and the people in t...

So, if you are someone like me who does not have cable you may have seen the show 'New Girl'. It is one of my favorite shows to re-watch multiple times because it never stops being funny. If you have seen it then you know exactly what my title is referring to from New Girl. If you have not seen it I will give a short explanation: the character Schmidt grows through a rough break-up and during this a woman breaks his... man parts, we will say. When he can take the cast off he wants to "re-launch" his personal brand to "danger". He is a marketing professional, so he holds a launch party with different elements of "danger". From that we are going to roll right into how branding of a blog and online reputations can make or break a company. Another real-world example of how important online reputations can be is the current climate of YouTube beauty gurus. There is a vlogger named Jeffree Star who in the past was a musician and in present day...

Have you heard the word “viral” used when talking about videos? Unless you live inside of a cave on the side of a mountain (my personal dream honestly) or have been in a coma for 10 years your answer is “yes”. If the situation is that you were in a coma for 10 years, then welcome to 2018: everything is terrible, and the Earth is dying. Anyways… I am going to give some examples of things that have gone viral in the last few years, but I am only going to provide one of two words about it. Here we go: Double rainbow, Covfefe, Friday music video, Boaty McBoatface (if you are not into UK news then you may not get that one), Tide pods, and I am sure there are plenty more I could name. Businesses use crowdsourcing, feedback from their customers, to get an idea of what their consumers, or “followers”, want to see from them as an organization/business. Crowdsourcing is when a company takes the “power of the crowd” or the opinions of their consumers into consideration when creating a new pr...

We live in a loud world. News stations with their constant stream of unfortunate events, social media throwing the opinions of your friends and loved ones in your face, and smartphones that keep you trapped in the digital world. Everyone has an opinion about everything and they need everyone else to hear what they have to say. When in reality, their opinion is exactly that – an opinion. An opinion is not fact, it is not research, and it is not credible no matter the medium because opinions are influenced YOU. I believe that now more than ever people should be doing their research about a subject before spouting off figures they saw in an article on The Onion. We have talked about how an attention-grabbing headline is very important in modern day journalism but sometimes that catchy headline can lead to the downfall of a lazy reader. People click “share” on Facebook without even opening the article or looking at the source. I have a friend who shared something on Facebook the other da...