#media future

First off, I had war flashbacks during the entire creation process of this account. Tumblr is a nebulous corner of the internet, one that I wanted to leave behind with every other mortifying thing I did as a teenager.

Yet here we are.

This time there will be no fandom-posting or anon ask games. No, I’m an adult doing serious work now here on tumblr dot com.

This blog, made specifically for a communications course on the future of media, exists in irony. I know my professor knows what he’s doing when he makes “create and maintain a tumblr blog for the semester” an assignment. I believe he thinks this is funny. I also agree with him if he does.

Enough. My name is Sarah, I’m 23, and I am a Master’s student in the Newhouse School at Syracuse University (newhouse.syr.edu, for those inclined). There are precautionary tales warning people of plainly sharing the information I just gave on the internet. It seems everyone is scared of what might happen online, the dangers of internet’s many unknowns. My most formative years have been spent online. I’m not scared of the people on the internet. I’m scared of the corporations that increasingly gain more control of our habits and information, and then exploiting us for a profit. It’s not a complete unknown. Corporations show us jargon-filled warnings openly saying that they’ll be tracking our online moves and using that data for their own reasons. This is a completely different can of worms.

No professor wants to hear that a student is taking their class to fulfill some sort of degree requirement set by the university. My professor (hello specifically to you, Sean, if you’re reading this) is lucky. I’m not taking this class to fulfill a degree requirement. I’m in this class because the school would not let me take the online social media night class that I wanted to take.  I love media, I think it’s fascinating, I want to see what happens next. Hearing stories about the early days of the internet is so exciting for me. Technology is so vast and manifests itself in an incredible number of ways, to the point that it is almost unimaginable to me what is in store for the future of tech. I’m hoping this class helps me to actualize where we’re heading in the fields of media and technology. I hope that it gives me a foundation that allows me to stay well-involved in these fields as they progress. And, as always, I’m hoping for some new networking opportunities.

I’m from Tennessee, I did my undergraduate studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville where I majored in journalism and electronic media and minored in Arab studies. For awhile I was certain I wanted to go into international journalism and report abroad or on foreign news. I even studied abroad in the Czech Republic and took a course specifically on how to be a foreign correspondent. I connected with journalists at the Reuters bureau in Prague, as well as journalists from the BBC, CNN, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Back in the states, I was a producer, writer, editor, etc for several campus television shows. It was fun and our equipment was so out of date. I put lower-thirds in our shows in real-time using a Chyron machine. Spending any time in the digital news center studio at Newhouse is streets ahead of what we had at UTK, and what most real newsrooms have. In the spring of 2020, I interned for Knoxville’s number one television station, WBIR Channel 10 News. It was a blast. And then the pandemic happened, which shifted my internship into a completely remote workflow. I went from jumping in station cars with reporters to check out a quarry blast to sitting in my parent’s house and writing the latest COVID-19 updates. I then graduated college via a slideshow set up on my laptop in my parent’s living room. It’s definitely a period of time that won’t be forgotten. Not long after graduation, I made the decision to move 800 miles away, in the middle of a pandemic, to start grad school. This was not a “oh no this global disaster has made it so that I don’t know what I want to do with my life,” situation. I had known since my first day of undergrad that I wanted to go to graduate school. I had done campus tours and gotten into every grad program I applied to, albeit moments before the pandemic’s onset. Going to grad school was part of my plans, whether a virus was around or not. I’m someone who sets longterm goals and works hard to stick to them. That’s why I’m here now. 

Throughout all of that, content creation was at the back of my mind. I love to edit video and create graphic designs and curate a social media presence. Because of those passions, my musician friends have designated me as their brand manager and let me handle their social media, promotions, and shows. I want to focus on social media and how it’s changing. I think it has a lot of power, but I also think that there are more advanced forms of social media coming.