Exegesis

Exegesis

The ‘Mardy Manu’ web presence pages displays my progress and passion for the band Arctic Monkeys and depicts my identity as a dedicated fan to the British alternative group. According to State of The Blogosphere, “hobbyists are the backbone of the blogosphere, and represent 60% of the online blogging community.” (2011) This is why I chose to base my web presence on something which was a hobby to me, because it’s entertaining, and not considered a chore. Both the central node used and the other contributing nodes are relatively similar in content demonstrating pictures of the band, songs I enjoy, animations about the music and band members, fan art, and satirical takes on the video clips which are considered entertaining. I decided to create my web presence on the Arctic Monkeys because they are a band that I listen to regularly and I’m quite well informed about-whether the topic is the band members’ personal lives, singles, albums, tours, and interviews- which is something I featured in the About Me page on my central node. The web presence on my central and contributing nodes features material covered in Module two of the course such as the Blogging component which helped me uncover what could be done to my web 2.0 tools- in particular, the two blogging sites I used; Tumblr, and Blogger.

I chose Blogger as my central node because there’s a variety of different tools users are able to put to use unlike some other social media sites. It’s broad, and allows for a great variety of versatility to be shown, unlike sites such as Twitter and Instagram. My  Blogger layout I wanted to be dark (black) because those are the colours associated with my theme of Arctic Monkeys and that’s why I chose the ‘Live On’ template for my central node- Blogger. Three out of five of their albums are concentrated on dark shades, and more recently their fifth studio album ‘AM‘ which was released earlier this year has a white on black theme- just like the layouts of the nodes which I could modify. The three contributing web 2.0 tools I used as nodes were Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr simply because they are the three I am familiar with and use quite regularly, therefore not too much time would be spent trying to play around with the functions they offer. I kept the Tumblr theme relatively the same as to that of Blogger (black on white) made by the user final-stand.tumblr.com who edits HTMLS to make a blogs appearance be more suitable to a particular theme. Some of the images on my Tumblr page were transfers from my posts on Instagram, but the rest were all reblogged from other Arctic Monkeys fan Tumblr accounts. Because you are unable to change themes and layouts of Instagram and Twitter pages, I tried to maintain those two pages as close to one another as I could. Instagram allows you to submit your posts to other websites you may have so I therefore was able to link my posts to both my Twitter and Tumblr page, so my followers and audiences would be able to make the association between the two and access it more easily.

The username I used among all four of my web presence creations (Mardy Manu) is a take on the Arctic Monkeys song. The song is called Mardy Bum from the Arctic Monkeys first studio album ‘Whatever People Say I am That’s What I’m Not’ (2006) which became the fastest selling debut album in UK chart history according to BBC. The song is considered a favourite by Arctic Monkeys fans and would be easily identified as being associated with Arctic Monkeys by my blog’s audiences. The contextual ‘Certified Mindblower’ I incorporated into all my web 2.0 tools comes from the song No. 1 Party Anthem from the Arctic Monkeys fifth studio album AM- and I chose to include these lyrics because it’s one of my favourite lyrics from my favourite song on that particular album. I figured it’d be wiser to maintain a constant heading with all my nodes to make it more identifiable as my identity on social media for my followers on my blogs and micro blogs. (Twitter and Instagram, which limit the amount you can post at a time) This was done by using features such as the hash tagging that  each of these nodes offer to share the content posted on one to another. The reason these websites have begun this system is to increase views online so other active users can access blogs they are interested in and rapidly identify what it’s about by searching up any tags for example, #music, #alternative, #arctic monkeys. This makes the exchanging of information extremely easy and allows a wide array of audiences to access new and early weblogs as well as interacting with the people behind them.

Throughout this web presence creations task I found that maintaining and updating my web 2.0 tools was simple. Reblogging, hash tagging, Book marking, and RSS feeds, has made the blogging experience facilitated and enjoyable. It was surprising that I managed to get follows and interactions on Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr from people around the world based on what I had posted and written about the Arctic Monkeys as they were able to track it, respond, reblog, interact, retweet, favourite, ‘like’ etc. Rebecca Blood stated in the humble beginnings of web 2.0 that she “considered weblogs an antidote for a media saturated culture.” I agree with this statement because people are now more commonly interested in expressing their points of views and interests online with Web 2.0’s drastic take on a constantly ever evolving media.