Westminster Student Blog Series

We will be posting a series of short vlogs, produced by University of Westminster Postgraduate students. They are all based on their research of social media. We will be posting one a week for the next few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled!


The Act of Sharing on Social Media

Author: Erxiao Wang

Social media has been the growing theme of the Information Age we live in. It is of considerable importance to understand, utilise, and engage wisely with social media platforms within our contemporary networked digital environment. This video is a theoretically inspired social media artefact; it introduces some of the key arguments in University of Westminster Professor Graham Meikle's book “Social Media: Communication, Sharing and Visibility”. This book includes theories such as the idea of media convergence, the business model of online sharing, the mediated online visibility and also the exploitable data that is subject to online surveillance. Moreover, Professor Meikle has also analysed the commercial Internet of Web 2.0 that enabled the user generated content and witnessed the coming together of the public and personal communication, and the always-on mobile connectivity has enabled greater mobility that allows social change. In order to make use of these key theories in our everyday practice and conversations of social media, I had a chat with a good friend of mine Junchi Deng, who is an accordion player who attends the Royal Academy of Music here in London and also posts and vlogs regularly. We talked about the act of sharing on social media, and the idea of promoting oneself on social networking sites, especially for a musician like himself. Our discussion centres around everyday use of social media, and our individual observations towards the incorporation and review of these platforms.