Part One The topic of my blog, “Labels Keep Me Stable,” will be organization as well as home décor. Originally I had suggested these as separate ideas for blogs, but after presenting my Google Slide on possible ideas to my peers, I came to the conclusion that my niche blog would be stronger and more cohesive if I combined the two separate ideas into one. The blog will cover organization and cleaning tips for every area of the home, as well as Do-It-Yourself projects to add personal style and additional organization. The cleaning part of the blog would focus on natural and effective ways to keep your home in tip top shape. It would also focus on making the best of small spaces, and figuring out clever ways to conceal personal items that someone may not want on display, while still providing easy access to these things. The Do-It-Yourself portion of the blog will directly correlate with the organization and cleaning portion by providing step by step instructions to make personalized décor to show off and make the most of any space. This blog will be different from others because it will be tailored to the individual needs of each reader. Although I plan to have a wide variety of readers, I will be sure to cover all the bases so that it meets anyone that could be reading the article's needs. I will do this by providing alternative designs, material, and brand options for any products mentioned, as well as being adaptable to any space. This way a reader on any budget, in any environment, in any room, closet, or area, will be able to follow along. Other blogs tend to focus on one particular space, whether it be kitchens, pantries, laundry rooms, bedrooms, closets, etc. This blog will provide tips for every room, and décor and organization tips and guides that could be applicable to any space. Additionally, “Labels Keep Me Stable” will focus on functional ideas rather than purposeless style pieces that many other blogs teach readers how to create. The audience that I aim to address are mainly women. This is not to say that some men would not be interested in the topic of my blog, but in general, women are more inclined to take interest in organization and design of the home. The audience that I expect to take interest in “Labels Keep Me Stable” would most likely be interested in home improvement in a general sense. This could include organization, unusual cleaning hacks, creative ways to clean, storage solutions, functional but appealing décor, self-made products, or some combination of all of these things. The audience’s age becomes a bit of a blur because these topics can correlate with many age ranges. It is hard to say for certain, but I would expect women between the ages of sixteen to fifty to be interested in the contents of my blog. I am making this assumption based on the information I know about when women begin to take interest in décor and cleanliness, and when they seem to stop seeing it as something important. Of course, this information could be slightly inaccurate, and there are always outliers to any type of data. Part Two: Blogs that similar to my own are vital resources in learning how to successfully run my own blog. They provide insight into things that I could do to improve my content and layout, as well as showing me things that I would prefer to avoid. In my exploration of blogs similar to my own, I compiled a list of ten that I thought lined up best with the niche I am working with. Of these ten blogs, three of them stuck out to me as my absolute favorite, and I feel that they will be the most beneficial in helping me develop my own organization and Do-It-Yourself décor blog. The first blog I fell in love with was “A Bowl Full of Lemons”. This blog had a beautiful layout with one column running down the middle of the page. This column had a brief paragraph about the contents of the link with a photo above each, similar to the layout of "I Heart Organizing". The about page was also very well laid out, with detailed information and an FAQ. The top of the page had a very well put quote to sum up the site that read, "A Bowl Full of Lemons is a growing community of people who aspire to get their lives in order. If you are new, Hello! I’m so glad you are here. Before you begin, think about what you are looking to achieve here at ABFOL. Do you want to get your home organized from top to bottom? Do you want to learn some cleaning tips? Is your budget a mess? Or are you looking to make new friends? There are many places you can begin, but the easiest way to get your life in order the “ABFOL way” is to follow these simple steps…" This friendly and easy to follow informational page is something that I aspire to replicate with my own spin, while also incorporating the clean look of "Simply Organized". There are multiple advertisements towards the top, side, and bottom of the page for many different brands which shows that the author makes a reasonable income off of them. The same assumption can be from "Clean and Scentsible's" blog. She also has an entire page dedicated to her advertisers, with an area to contact her if a brand or company wished to advertise a product on her page. The page is doing extremely well, with over 100,000 Facebook fans and even more Pinterest followers. Readers of this page are likely women from twenties to mid -life, who are either first time home owners, or busy moms who want to live a more organized and stylish life.
Another blog that I admired was “Everything Etsy”. The basic layout of this page incorporated two columns in the blog with the column on the right for advertisements, and the column on the left for pictures of the project, a hyperlinked title, and a brief description of why you may want to create the project. The author of “Everything Etsy,” Kimberly Layton, does not have an about me page, unlike the authors of "A Beautiful Mess," and instead identifies herself exclusively through her writing and personal details of her articles. There are many advertisements off to the right of the page, and all of them are related to the content of the blog. They include places to buy crafts supplies and tools to complete the crafts on the blog, which I think is a great advertising technique. “Everything Etsy” is linked to IKEA, which helps link it to a younger and low budgeted audience. It is also linked to Etsy, which is a website for creating your own products and is strongly entwined with the blog. This particular blog is aimed at twenty-something year olds who are interested in DIY crafts and budgeting strategies, but still want to be trendy and fun. Another blog that I looked at was “Honey We’re Home,” which was not my favorite, but was still a good resource to examine. The page is organized into five columns with small thumbnail photos and titles of each article. From an aesthetic standpoint the blog is beautiful, but from a functionality point of view, it is not the most organized. It would be difficult for a reader to navigate through the tiny thumbnails to find exactly what they’re looking for without having to click on each link. "Organizing Made Fun" also has a very unorganized look to it, as well as a distracting theme. Down the right of the page, it has a list of every social media site and every form of contact possible, which would be wonderful if it were arranged a bit better. There are almost no stand out advertisements, but the articles talk about specific brands and products that you need to create the project, an idea used by the blog "Organizing Junkie," which is indirect advertising. The blog is also linked with many other brands, as the author has been mentioned in many different places. These include Family Circle, House Beautiful, Better Homes & Gardens, Pottery Barn, Joss & Main, and many more. The blog has about 483,000 page views, as well as a weekly newsletter. I would expect almost entirely women to view this page, likely from teenagers to middle aged women. The author organizes her page by topic which allows for many subdomains of readership, but makes the blog less cohesive and more confusing. "Organizing Home Life" also uses subdomains, but they are much more closely related to the topic of the blog, which makes it preferable.
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The humiliation associated with seeing an old photo or video of yourself is a universal feeling that everyone has gone through at one point or another. Parents showing their child’s baby pictures to their friends or boyfriend, old home videos of bath time, revisiting childhood outfits that made you question your parents sanity for having put you in, the list is extensive. As time goes on, these chances for shame and humiliation via technology grow, as social media becomes part of the mix. Social media came into life at an earlier age than it probably should have been. I chatted with friends on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and spent a good portion of my time rearranging my “Top 10” friends list on MySpace according to who my best friends were that particular week. By the end of middle school, Facebook had made a name for itself in the world of social media, and I had eagerly hopped on the bandwagon. ![]() Facebook started off as something great. It was created with the intentions of being a place to reconnect with friends, share accomplishments, ideas, and even cute cat videos, with everyone on your friends list. My emotional and melodramatic teenage self did not see it for these purposes, unfortunately. Instead, I used it as more of a public diary, which was quite an oxymoron. As stated in Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, “The mindful use of digital media does not happen automatically” (Rhinegold 2012). I used it as a place to vent, and to tell the world my troubles, even though the world really did not need to hear them. It was rare that I paid any consequences for these public rantings, as my family did not yet have Facebook accounts of their own, and I was not popular enough for anyone of significance to pay attention to what I had to say online. This carefree phase would come to a close soon enough, as I finished up my sophomore year of high school and started what would be the most significant relationship I would ever have. Up until that year, my relationships were short and catty for the most part. The longest relationship I had been in was a whopping four months, and that was impressive for an underclassmen. When I found myself in a relationship with my fast friend, Tobias Lloyd, I didn't immediately think that there was anything different about it. I had met him freshman year, when he sat behind me and slept through our American Sign Language class, only waking up long enough to look annoyed and check the clock. When our paths crossed again the summer of my sophomore year, we started dating and saw each other nearly every day. Social media, texting, and other forms of technology were not a part of our relationship in the beginning. It was summer, and we had better things to do than sit inside on a computer or phone. It wasn’t until the summer came to a close and we went back to our usual lives, where we saw each other much less frequently, that I learned that the way I was used to “dating” someone and solving conflicts was not going to cut it any longer. ![]() It was common practice for relationships in our high school to take place mostly over text messages and Facebook statuses and shared links. As David Barton and Mary Hamilton mentioned, “There are different literacies associated with different domains of life” (Situated Literacies 200). It was a difficult adjustment to go from seeing each other face to face every day, to only seeing each other in passing. When we didn't see eachother every single day, but we were sure that we needed to, we made up for it by texting each other constantly. This is where I learned that sometimes, texting is not the best form of communication. In an attempt to tell Tobias everything that I would have told him if I saw him in person, I typed out paragraphs worth of messages that recapped every thought and event that happened to me during the day. When he would finally answer back with short and concise responses, I was instantly annoyed. Why didn't he put in the time and effort to respond to every detail of my message? At the time, it didn't even occur to me that someone could make a point in less than three paragraphs. The very next day, I would make it a point to act as sulky as possible when I passed him in the halls, even though he never seemed affected by it. Tone also came into play as time went on. When speaking to someone in person, it is easy to control the type of voice used and facial expressions used in order to convey emotion. When texting, emailing, or using other forms of digital written communication, it is not as simple, and tone and meaning can become lost in translation. Emojis can make up for some of the lost emotion, but even they can be misinterpreted. Additionally, some people like Tobias, think that emoji’s are pointless, and for the most part, refuse to use them in conversation. It was around this time that technology began to take its toll on our relationship. Some of our worst fights took place over text messages, which wasn't the best way to hash out a problem, but it was at least still just between the two of us. These fights were almost always ignited by me, and it embarrasses me to reflect on them knowing what I know now. ![]() The arguments we had were almost entirely digitally based. I would lose my temper over the most absurd things, and Tobias would suffer the consequences. A frequent argument we had concerned my obsession with long winded messages. If Tobias didn't respond to every detail of my digital essay, I was offended. If he did not write his own digital essay about his day, I was offended. If he did not make me his Woman Crush Wednesday (#wcw), I was offended, despite the fact that I knew he rarely even thought about using social media. As time went on, I continued my antics with no difference. Each time I would lose my mind over something small, Tobias would text me the same logic based responses to try and make me see reason. I hated it. At the time, all I wanted was for him to crumble and apologize like every other guy I had dated. Typically, I would throw a fit and the person I was with would give in to whatever it was that I wanted, to keep me happy. Yes, I was a brat. With Tobias, things were different. He had a backbone, and had no problem telling me no when it came to my ridiculous requests and breakdowns, which was something no one had told me before. As a bratty teenager, I refused to step back and think about the situation. I wanted my way, and that was that. Instead of listening to Tobias, and thinking about things logically, I chose to ignore him and thought about things emotionally. My reasoning then told me that if he wouldn't listen to my text messages, maybe he would listen to me over social media. Fueled by anger, I would jump to my computer and write a status to show everyone how upset I was. As Tobias pointed out, I would always make the statuses as anonymous as possible, in order to avoid any confrontation or blame on my part. Even though I thought these statuses would make him feel guilty and apologize, they actually made him very annoyed and escalated our bickering. “Showing all the happiness and everything [in a relationship] is fine but if you’re having arguments and stuff, that doesn’t belong out there for everyone else...That should be your own business that you should be able to solve with your own [significant other]. I just remember whenever there was an issue it would show up as anonymously as possible on social media. It made [the relationship] difficult because it wasn’t us solving our problems ourselves, it just became spouting our problems out” (Tobias Lloyd 2017). ![]() It took a while, but eventually I realized that this method of displaying our problems on social media was not in any way going to solve our problems. Instead, it was only making them worse. In the beginning, I thought that he was the stubborn one for not giving in to my ridiculous demands, but after a while, I realized that it was actually me. Posting our problems as a Facebook statuses only angered Tobias, and involved other people who should never have been aware of our problems in the first place. Once I realized this, I controlled myself when I became upset and worked it out one-on-one with him instead of making it public, and shocker, it worked. Our relationship improved almost instantaneously as I learned to control my impulse posting, and forced myself to actually deal with our problems instead of posting about them and hoping they would just go away. Today, nearly five years later, we are still together and it has been a very long time since I have used social media to announce anything about our relationship that is not positive. In fact, as time has passed and my schedule has become more and more frantic, social media has started to lose its appeal. However, there are times when I am using one account or another and run across a snapshot of one of my older posts. The humiliation associated with seeing what I had posted is enough to remind me to never make those mistakes again. The humiliation associated with seeing an old photo or video of yourself is a universal feeling that everyone has gone through at one point or another. Parents showing their child’s baby pictures to their friends or boyfriend, old home videos of bath time, revisiting childhood outfits that made you question your parents sanity for having put you in, the list is extensive. As time goes on, these chances for shame and humiliation via technology grow, as social media becomes part of the mix. Social media became a part of my life at an earlier age than it probably should have been. I chatted with friends on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and spent a good portion of my time rearranging my “Top 10” friends list on MySpace according to who my best friends were that particular week. By the end of middle school, Facebook had made a name for itself in the world of social media, and I had hopped on the bandwagon.
Facebook started off as something great. It was intended to be a place to reconnect with friends, share accomplishments, ideas, and even cute cat videos, with everyone on your friends list. My emotional and melodramatic teenage self did not see it for these purposes, unfortunately. Instead, I used it as more of a public diary, which was quite an oxymoron. I used it as a place to vent, and to tell the world my troubles, even though the world really did not need to hear them. It was rare that I paid any consequences for these public rantings, as my family did not yet have Facebook accounts of their own, and I was not popular enough for anyone of significance to pay attention to what I had to say online. This carefree phase would come to a close soon enough, as I finished up my sophomore year of highschool and started what would be the most significant relationship I would ever have. Up until that year, my relationships were short and catty for the most part. The longest relationship I had been in was a whopping four months, and that was impressive for an underclassmen. When I found myself in a relationship with my fast friend, Tobias Lloyd, I didn't immediately think that there was anything different about it. I had met him freshman year, when he sat behind me and slept through our American Sign Language class, only waking up long enough to look annoyed and check the clock. When our paths crossed again the summer of my sophomore year, we started dating and saw each other nearly every day. Social media, texting, and other forms of technology were not a part of our relationship in the beginning. It was summer, and we had better things to do than sit inside on a computer or phone. It wasn’t until the summer came to a close and we went back to our usual lives, where we saw each other much less frequently, that I learned that the way I was used to “dating” someone and solving conflicts was not going to cut it any longer. It was common practice for relationships in our high school to take place mostly over text messages and facebook statuses and shared links. It was a difficult adjustment to go from seeing each other face to face every day, to only seeing each other in passing. When we didn't see eachother every single day, but we were sure that we needed to, we made up for it by texting each other constantly. This is where I learned that sometimes, texting is not the best form of communication. In an attempt to tell Tobias everything that I would have told him if I saw him in person, I typed out paragraphs worth of messages that recapped every thought and event that happened to me during the day. When he would finally answer back with short and concise responses, I was instantly annoyed. Why didn't he put in the time and effort to respond to every detail of my message? At the time, it didn't even occur to me that someone could make a point in less than three paragraphs. The very next day, I would make it a point to act as sulky as possible when I passed him in the halls, even though he never seemed affected by it. Tone also came into play as time went on. When speaking to someone in person, it is easy to control the type of voice used and facial expressions used in order to convey emotion. When texting, emailing, or using other forms of digital written communication, it is not as simple, and tone and meaning can become lost in translation. Emojis can make up for some of the lost emotion, but even they can be misinterpreted. Additionally, some people like Tobias, think that emoji’s are pointless, and for the most part, refuse to use them in conversation. It was around this time that technology began to take its toll on our relationship. Some of our worst fights took place over text messages, which wasn't the best way to hash out a problem, but it was at least still just between the two of us. These fights were almost always ignited by me, and it embarrasses me to reflect on them knowing what I know now. The arguments we had were almost entirely digitally based. I would lose my temper over the most absurd things, and Tobias would suffer the consequences. A frequent argument we had concerned my obsession with long winded messages. If Tobias didn't respond to every detail of my digital essay, I was offended. If he did not write his own digital essay about his day, I was offended. If he did not make me his Woman Crush Wednesday (#wcw), I was offended, despite the fact that I knew he rarely even thought about using social media. As time went on, I continued my antics with no difference. Each time I would lose my mind over something small, Tobias would text me the same logic based responses to try and make me see reason. I hated it. At the time, all I wanted was for him to crumble and apologize like every other guy I had dated. Typically, I would throw a fit and the person I was with would give in to whatever it was that I wanted, to keep me happy. Yes, I was a brat. With Tobias, things were different. He had a backbone, and had no problem telling me no when it came to my ridiculous requests and breakdowns, which was something that I really had not heard before. As a bratty teenager, I refused to step back and think about the situation. I wanted my way, and that was that. Instead of listening to Tobias, and thinking about things logically, I chose to ignore him and think about things emotionally. Sigh. If he wouldn't listen to me over text messages, maybe he would listen to me over social media. Fueled by anger, I would jump to my computer and write a status to show everyone how upset I was. As Tobias pointed out, they were always as anonymous as possible, in order to avoid any confrontation or blame on my part. Even though I thought these statuses would make him feel guilty, they actually made him very annoyed. “Showing all the happiness and everything [in a relationship] is fine but if you’re having arguments and stuff, that doesn’t belong out there for everyone else...That should be your own business that you should be able to solve with your own [significant other]. I just remember whenever there was an issue it would show up as anonymously as possible on social media. It made [the relationship] difficult because it wasn’t us solving our problems ourselves, it just became spouting our problems out” (Tobias Lloyd 2017). It took a while, but eventually I realized that this method of displaying our problems on social media was not in any way going to solve our problems. Instead, it was only making them worse. In the beginning, I thought that he was the stubborn one for not giving in to my ridiculous demands, but after a while, I realized that it was actually me. Posting our problems as a Facebook statuses only angered Tobias, and involved other people who should never have been aware of our problems in the first place. Once I realized this, I controlled myself when I became upset and worked it out one-on-one with him instead of making it public, and shocker, it worked. The following are possibilities for my digital literacy narrative,
1. My first idea for my digital literacy narrative is my experience learning how to type and use computers in elementary school. I had the same teacher from kindergarten to first grade for my computer block, and she was awful. I remember crying in almost every class, and getting sick on the days that I knew I would have to go to that block. The teacher would ridicule me and call on me for answers that she knew I did not have, in front of the entire class. This experience delayed my progression in digital literacies because it made using any sort of technology very uncomfortable for me. If I chose this as my narrative, I would add photos of some of the assignments I had to do in the class, as well as edited pictures of the classroom environment. 2. My second narrative option could be about my online hobby, or obsession, with pinterest. I have a board on Pinterest for just about everything in my life. I have a board for my wedding planning ideas, a board for each room in my home, a board for my future classrooms, and even for tattoo ideas and artwork I like. This is one of my favorite forms of digital literacy because it is an easy place to sort and organize my ideas, while being able to find and share new ideas with a global community. Photos would be easy for this board, because I would use some of the images I have pinned to express each board in some sort of collage or as individuals. 3. My last idea for my digital literacy narrative has to do with my struggles with learning the do's and dont's of social media when in a relationship. When I was first dating the person I am still with now, Facebook was still a relatively big deal. When we would get in an argument, usually over text messages, I would write a dramatic and illusive yet obvious Facebook post about my feelings and opinions of our argument. This was, without a doubt, one of my more horrible ideas while in high school. It almost always led to whatever argument we were in, blowing up and turning into a public matter when it never should have been public in the first place. This was a very difficult lesson in the consequences of posting personal information online. For this literacy story, I could try to find old statuses to screenshot and post, but it would be very difficult as I may have deleted them all, and or may not really want to share them again! After reading Berry, Hawisher, and Selfe's Literacy Artifacts, I began to reflect on digital artifacts from my own past, and what they have done to shape my future. The reading put an emphasis on how technology and digital literacy are always changing and advancing. This made me think about how people either change with the times, or get left behind. Either way, the existence of digital literacy acts as a constant universal recording device for ideas and experiences, that allows one to go back and access things in a way that would not be possible without a digital existence. At one point, the reading states, "I doubt such collective life would be possible were it not for our human capacity to organize and communicate experience in a narrative form. For it is the conventionalization of narrative that converts individual experience into collective coin which can be circulated, as it were, on a base wider than a merely interpersonal one" (Bruner 2003, p. 16). ![]() One of the first things I thought of after reading this particular excerpt was a quote that I stumbled across quite a few years ago on tumblr. This quote reflects my history with digital literacy, because after I read it I changed the way I thought of things. The community on tumblr, where I found the quote, tended to be more open minded and accepting than other communities and groups. This quote had been reblogged thousands and thousands of times, which lead me to believe that there were that many people that agreed with this statement. Now years later, I still have this quote saved in my phone and printed out. It hangs in a small frame on my wall, as well as frequenting my Facebook and Instagram descriptions. The quote makes me feel confident and comfortable in my own skin, as well as giving me hope that other people feel the same way as me about overcoming the ordinary. This artifact represents me and the way that I tend to think about things. If I could have an overall life motto, this would be it. Economic, social, political, and historical factors could all be applied to this quote, as it is so extremely diverse, which is part of the reason that I love it so much. This artifact reflects my own literacy practices as it has been circulated throughout the internet, in the same way that I surf the internet. As the excerpt above mentions, individual thoughts, experiences, and ideas can be made into a collective coin through the use of technology. Rheingold’s Introduction: Why You Need Digital Know-How – Why We All Need It, is a brief overview of his stance on digital literacies as well as the more specific topics concerning digital literacies that each chapter of his book covers. I recommend reading through the introduction, linked above, to decide if this book is right for you! In a general sense, Rheingold describes his stance on digital literacies as a tool that can do great things if handled correctly. He explains that digital literacy is easier for some than others, and while there is still a debate over how good or bad it is for the mind, there are definitely benefits for everyone in joining the digital literacy bandwagon. He goes over the positive leaps and bounds that have been made in recent years as technology and digital literacy continue to grow and develop, while also listing things to be wary of, and pitfalls to avoid in the digital world. At one point, Rheingold writes, “It turns out that digital networks can also amplify some of human being’s less laudable social behaviors. The art of ‘presentation of self’ becomes all-important when you are trying to wrest control of your reputation from others” (Rheingold 24-25). This quote perfectly encapsulates the experiences I have had with social media while at Rowan University. Rheingold points out that digital networks can exaggerate moments that need not be exaggerated, and lead someone to look bad for all the wrong reasons. As a teacher candidate, we are encouraged to keep our social media pages and other digital networks presentable, as if a future boss were viewing it before an interview. This relates to Rheingold’s definition of ‘presentation of self,’ as teacher candidates are taught to think of any digital content as a part of their professional reputation.
When we were first told about this rule of thumb, not putting anything online that we wouldn’t want a potential employer to see, it seems simple enough. However, I find myself double, and sometimes even triple checking anything that I decide to post on a social networking platform. In this way, digital literacy leaks into my daily routines by causing me to review anything that I post, and or what other people have posted through someone else’s eyes. What are they good for?
..... Absolutely Everything! In Situated Literacies; Reading and Writing in Context, David Barton and Mary Hamilton discuss literacy practices in extreme depth. At one point they go on to loosely define it as a set of social practices, meaning that the literacy practices and norms change based on the group in which they are taking place. These groups include schools, churches, homes, and other distinct clusters of people. Within these groups, literacy practices are broken up even further within discourse communities. These “discourse communities” are groups of people held together by the way that they talk, act, interpret, and use written language. In simpler terms, they are the smaller groups that form within larger groups. They influence literacy practices by spreading their ideas and particular practices from one group to another. Due to the fact that discourse communities have foggy boundaries and are not isolated, it is difficult to pinpoint where any particular practice originated from. Barton and Hamilton continue their lengthy explanation of literacy practices by pointing out that they can include a mix of print, as well as digital, visual, video, and other forms. All of these forms of communication are interconnected, especially with text. I myself am a part of a small circle of friends that rarely see each other. To keep everyone updated on major life milestones and or smaller details of importance, we keep a running group chat going. This group chat takes place on a phone, and mainly includes text messages between all of us. However, it can occasionally include videos from either YouTube or FaceTime, GIFs, photographs, recordings, or live verbal communication. Without this mixed type of literacy practice, our friendships would crumble. These acts reflect the social nature of literacy practices by being a part of the small discourse community between our friend group, while seeping into other groups as well. This could be because someone quotes something from the group chat to a person from another group, or something small and subconscious. |
Michele Trimnell
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