Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: New Media Art

 

Copyright-free photo from Pexels.com.

The new media artist that I chose to discuss is Sally McKenney from Sally’s Baking Addiction blog (https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/). McKenney launched this popular blog in 2011 and since then has become very popular with thousands of followers on her blog and on her social media sites that branched off the blog. Sally’s Baking Addiction revolves around content marketing. McKenney does not sell any products on her blog, but she joins the many bloggers who use their writing and photos on their blogs for content marketing.

For her blog, McKenney creates recipes and bakes them, writes the blog, takes photos, edits the photos, and posts the content. McKenney is a new media artist because she uses new media for her photo editing. Photos are a significant portion of her website and social media pages. This new media that McKenney uses to edit her photography is called Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. This technology is only a few years old and qualifies as new media because of the potential it allows users. According to New Media Art. (2016, May 26), “New media art is a comprehensive term that encompasses art forms that are either produced, modified, and transmitted by means of new media/digital technologies.” This definition explains Adobe Photoshop’s role as new media art.

One of the media genres that McKenney incorporates into her work is mobile technologies. McKenney’s website is very compatible with smartphones. Also, McKenney uses mobile technologies such as Instagram to connect better with her readers. Lastly, McKenney has several social media websites that are compatible with mobile technologies.

McKenney’s editing artwork reflects the current media art culture of high-quality photography that is literally “picture-perfect.” Adobe Lightroom adds an extra level of finesse to McKenney’s photos that can be clearly seen. In this post, McKenney shows some photos before and after the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom is used. (If you want to view these photos, visit My 3 Essentials for Food Photography page from Sally’s Baking Addiction at https://Sallysbakingaddiction.com/2015/05/20/3-essentials-food-photography.) Sally comments “I adjusted the clarity, shadows, highlights, saturation, and contrast in Lightroom to get us that much brighter, more cheerful after photo (McKenney, S., 2017, June 13, My 3 Essentials for Food Photography).”

As a new media artist, McKenney is trying to communicate high-quality with her Adobe Photoshop Lightroom-edited photos. This message of high-quality was successfully communicated, as judged by the thousands of people who follow her blog and social media sites. McKenney attributes a very large portion of that success to her photos, which she calls the “bread and butter” of her blog and states that “not many readers read the text of the blog. They are there for the photos…Photography is what draws in my crowd. And makes them stay (McKenney, S., Food Photography Basics, n.d.). McKenney’s writing acts as the narrative behind her photography which completes her blog. McKenney incorporates many different talents: Blogging narratives, photography, photo editing, recipe creating, and baking to create a stellar blog.

Through photo editing which demonstrates her commitment to high quality, McKenney is trying to say that she is keeping the photos as lifelike as possible. She states, “I think of modifying my photos as putting life back into them. From real life to camera, a lot of natural depth, contrast, and highlight is completely lost. Therefore, I spend time with each photo modifying it back to its original (McKenney, S., 2017, June 13, My 3 Essentials for Food Photography).”

McKenney has demonstrated through her achievements in positively reaching a huge audience that she an expert in content marketing, and her photo editing through the new media art of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom helped turn her website into the picture-perfect blog that it is today.

References

McKenney, S. Food Photography Basics. (n.d.). Sally’s Baking Addiction. Retrieved from

https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/food-photography-basics/

McKenney, S. (2017, June 13). Sally’s Baking Addiction. My 3 Essentials for Food

Photography. Retrieved from

https://Sallysbakingaddiction.com/2015/05/20/3-essentials-food-photography

New Media Art. (2016, May 26). Oxford Bibliographies. Retrieved from

http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199920105/obo-9780199920105-0082.xml

Media Technologies – Microblogging

 

Copyright-free photo from Pixabay.com.

For this blog assignment, I chose “Twitter, Tumblr, and Microblogging” from the Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media as my chapter. My chosen new media genre is mobile technologies and this chapter is relevant to this genre because mobile technologies have created greater access to microblogging. According to Ryan, M., Emerson, L., & Robertson, B. J., “mobile reading and updates helped fuel the rapid adaption of microblogs (2014, p. 493).”

 

This chapter also fits in well with my path of inquiry which is “The Business of New Media” and my topic which is content marketing. Microblogs constitute a widely-used social media platform that have great influence on content marketing.

“Twitter, Tumblr, and Microblogging” deepened my understanding of microblogging and this media’s relevance to both content marketing and mobile technologies. One of the reasons content marketing is successful on microblogs is that it builds a relationship between businesses and consumers by allowing the audience to be in touch. I found it interesting that Ryan, M., et. al started that “many of them [microblogs] emphasize what the creator is doing, reading, finding, looking at, or thinking about… (2014, p. 492).” This level of detailed communication that builds relationships was not a reality before microblogs, and it remains a content marketing tactic. I previously understood the fact that this new media connects microbloggers with users, but this chapter opened my eyes to the association of this phenomenon with content marketing.

Ryan, M., et. al define microblogging as “a practice that applies a size constraint to the content of blogs (2014, p. 492)” and also state that it “primarily refers to posting that takes place on specific platforms whose design either encourages or enforces brief communication (2014, p. 492).”

 

Copyright-free photo from Pixabay.com.

 

I chose Tumblr as the current example of media within the mobile technologies genre which connects to the chapter’s content because Tumblr is a microblog.

Ayyar R. states that “Tumblr has seen some spectacular growth…With about 189 million blogs hosted on Tumblr, 93 million new posts every single day, and about 42% of the entire domestic traffic of the United States visiting Tumblr blogs, it is well and truly a force to reckon with (Ayyar R., 8 July 2014).” Tumblr Marketing: An Untapped Resource states that “several brands have found ways to effectively market their products and services to Tumblr’s unique audience of 555 million users (2016, December 07).” Tumblr and other microblogging sites are successfully employed as content marketing platforms that appeal to mobile technology users.

Microblogging is a form of new media that has quickly become a trend as a content marketing strategy. Mobile technologies have provided access to microblogs, which ultimately increases content marketing.

 

References

Ayyar, R. (8 July 2014). 7 Original Ways to Use Tumblr for Content Marketing. The Content

     Wrangler, The Content Wrangler, thecontentwrangler.com/2014/07/08/7-original-ways-to-     use-tumblr-for-content-marketing/#.

Ryan, M., Emerson, L., & Robertson, B. J. (2014). The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media.

Johns Hopkins University Press.

Tumblr Marketing: An Untapped Resource. (2016, December 07). Retrieved from

https://www.scripted.com/content-marketing/tumblr-marketing-guide

Personal Reflections on My Glossary Activity

 

This photo was taken from Pexels.com (a copyright-free source).

 

My glossary activity for the course, History and Theory of New Media, defined and further explained content marketing.

My experience with content marketing is working at Mohawk Valley Community College as a newsletter writer. The college’s Advanced Institute for Manufacturing (AIM) releases regular newsletters that are electronically distributed to approximately 700 people and heavily involve content marketing. My job is to write articles that will both promote AIM and encourage people to read more, which is an example of content marketing.

For the glossary assignment, I visited several different websites to find information that would pull together the often-misunderstood term of content marketing into one continuous, flowing document. I chose to focus on 3 platforms of content marketing: social media marketing, printed content marketing, and email marketing. My aim for the glossary assignment was to provide a broad overview of content marketing that would be reminiscent of an encyclopedia article meant to help readers understand the main concept without overwhelming them with many details and terms. I wanted my readers to grasp the meaning of content marketing without losing any interest they had in the topic through long explanations of the strategies, types, and platforms of content marketing.

 

This photo was taken from Pixabay.com (a copyright-free source).

 

Many of the sources that I researched and gathered information from discussed social media as a form of content marketing. Through the glossary assignment, I gained a deeper level of knowledge regarding social media as a widely-used content marketing platform. Flew, T. suggests that social media changed the face of content marketing in the following statement, “developments in internet software and platforms…enabled Web applications to move from being static and based around a push of content from producers to users with limited interactivity, to a scenario where the engagement, participation and collaboration amount users themselves generates the content (2014, p. 25).” Social media allowed content marketing to become a company-to-consumer relationship in which the target audience could easily participate and provide feedback regarding the content. Flew, T. goes on to state that YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia are included in this type of internet user-to-user experience.

In my research, I found that the Content Marketing Institute website provides a wealth of information on my topic, and this source will be very helpful to me as I work on my final research project for this course.

Researching and writing for this assignment improved my knowledge of content marketing and better prepared me for this course’s final research project on the topic. The statistics about the business of content marketing that I found in my research (I only included a few in the glossary) were very interesting to me and opened my eyes to the many benefits of content marketing.

References

Flew, T. (2014). New media (4th ed.). Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

 

 

 

Content Marketing Timeline of Milestones

For this assignment, my timeline relates to content marketing.

Please note that this timeline is not exhaustive, because there are far too many milestones in content marketing history to record. I chose some of the many milestones in the timeline of content marketing. Details of the milestones and references are listed below the graph.

Also, the start of content marketing is widely debated. Some say that they started as cave paintings, others say Poor Richard’s Almanac lead the way, and still others state that John Deere’s The Furrow magazine was the birth of content marketing. In this timeline, I started it out with Poor Richard’s Almanac.

The dates were often difficult to pin down (such as the launch date of specific magazines and even the date of the invention of blogs), which is why many of these dates only specify the year.

I hope that this timeline is informative and easy to follow. Please see the link below.

Content Marketing Timeline

Content Marketing: Using Media Learning to Increase Profits

Image taken from Pexels.com (copyright-free photo site).

My path of inquiry is media learning and my topic is content marketing. Content marketing is using media to educate target groups with the goal of leading them to purchase decisions. I chose this path of inquiry and topic because I am interested in media learning and I want to learn more about content marketing for my future career.

Content marketing intertwines with “the business of new media” path of inquiry. However, I chose the “media and learning” path of inquiry because content marketing revolves around education. Content marketing works to inform recipients about a topic they are interested in while enticing them to purchase the company’s products and/or services. One of content marketing’s valuable achievements is building a loyal customer base founded on free, high-quality information (Ruffolo, B., 2017, March 30).

My experience with content marketing is writing regular newsletters for my job at Mohawk Valley Community College (MVCC). The newsletters are for MVCC’s Advanced Institute of Manufacturing (AIM) and the focus of each issue is to inform readers about manufacturing while encouraging them to use AIM’s services.

Content marketing’s horizons are limitless as marketing tools continue to emerge and as technology stretches to every corner of the globe.

References

Ruffolo, B. (2017, March 30). What is Content Marketing? Retrieved from

https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/what-is-content-marketing.

Google Street View Privacy Issue

For this 1^st blog assignment in the History and Theory of Media course, I chose the chapter The Googlization of Us and my topic is privacy regarding Google Street View.

According to Chun, W. H., Fisher, A. W., & Keenan, T., Google is one of the “new media aggregators,” (2016, p. 577). Google Maps and Google Street View are services of this colossal media company and Google Maps has over 1 billion users (Gibbs, S., 2015, February 08).

Gibbs, S. states that “Street View has proved to be one of Google Map’s most controversial but popular features (2015, February 08).” The controversy lies within privacy concerns. Google Street View (GSV) was started in big cities in the United States including New York in May of 2007 (Chun, W. H., 2016, p. 587). According David de la Pena, “Before [Google Street View], we relied primarily on aerial photographs, MS Live 3D aerials, and photos we would take ourselves (Chun, W. H., et al. 2016, p. 588). Pena endorsed Google Street View over its primary counterparts by saying, “none of these replaces on-the-ground research (Chun, W. H., et al. 2016, p. 588).” However, as the technology of Google Street View launched, it was overshadowed with a public concern over privacy that is still alive today.

Chun, W. H., et al. stated that “Many commentators declared the service [GSV] to be too invasive for comfort (2016, p. 588).” The privacy issue does reflect my own experience with this technology. I want privacy and do not want GSV to get any closer to my personal life than it does already, but I appreciate the service because it helps me navigate. This is the conclusion that many people have come to – they tolerate the invasion of their privacy due to the convenience of the technology, but do not want it to intrude into their lives any further.

The fact that I found interesting about this topic was that, while an outcry about privacy concerns arose when Google Street View launched, the protests quieted down considerably only after a few weeks (Chun, W. H., et al. 2016, p. 588). As people realized the potential that GSV had to reduce their time and frustration in navigation, they quickly decided that sacrificing some privacy was worth the new technology.

My example in relation to this topic that Google was fined $7 million in 2013 for privacy reasons regarding Street View (Newcomb, A., 2013, March 13). Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen stated that GSV vehicles “collected names, passwords, addresses, emails and other personal information from millions of unencrypted home and business Wi-Fi networks (Newcomb, A., 2013, March 13).” The privacy issue, although less of the panic that it was when Street View launched, is still a concern to people around the world.

Today, as Google Street View technologies constantly emerge, it will be interesting to see what other privacy issues arise along with the developing improvements and how they will be resolved.

References

Chun, W. H., Fisher, A. W., & Keenan, T. (2016). New media, old media: a history and theory reader (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

Gibbs, S. (2015, February 08). Google Maps: a decade of transforming the mapping landscape. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/08/google-maps-10-anniversary-iphone-android-street-view

Newcomb, A. (2013, March 13). Google to Pay $7 Million Fine for Street View Privacy Breach. Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/google-hit-million-fine-street-view-privacy-breach/story?id=18717950