Social Media Blog Comparison

Nan's social media analysis primarily focuses on analyzing a trend that emerged from “Falling Stars”. She breaks down her analysis into three meta-function categories of ideational, inner-personal, and textual. She explores the myth behind the images and the social media trend through her analysis model and exposes the commentary of wealth, class, influence, and presence as it relates to items, film, and trending posts.

Collin

Collin's blog post primarily focuses on analyzing the "Explore" tab on Instagram. He commends the AI functionality of taking his preferences from his account activity and creating a feed of recommended content. He also criticizes the tool for creating discontinuous collections of posts that are void of his personal and relational interests as they exist with the people that he follows.

Jill

Jill's analysis is a more visual essay format. Instead of commenting directly on the visual images or any myth breakdown, the categorization of images in the beginning and the subsequent images that follow allow for much interpretation. The task is evaluating why she chose the categories of notation, and how they relate to the images.

Compare/Contrast

Nan took a very formal approach to her media analysis. She primarily focused on using a visual analysis tool from her research that would categorize and break down elements of the visual media compositions and their relationship to the myth associated with each level of analysis. Collin took a more presentational approach to his visual analysis and explained a more critical functional analysis of how his social media posts were curated by digital tools in the app's system. Jill mosly formatted her analysis as a visual essay. The key at the top of the blog gives the analytical framework for evaluating the posts, and it is a very effective choice in terms of allowing personal understandings of the content to be included in each person's analysis of the media.

My recommended post

I believe that Jill's post was the most pleasant media evaluation post. She used the least description of any posts that I read from the class, and she made the framework for each viewer to perform their own analysis. With her post I was able to question the levels of visual meaning in the posts in the framework of the category of the image. For example, "posts by friends of content they did not create" creates the space to question the image itself, how it relates to the desired perception of the person who posted it, the meaning behind the creator of the content, and how the different levels of use and reuse speak to its presence and impact on the feed. I spent the most time on her blog because of this almost autonomous framework for analysis.