Harrison's Communication Blog

  Personal branding is now instrumental in successfully navigating the job market. Branding used to be the exclusive domain of corporations and their attempts to highlight their product or service. Now that social media has made everyone more interconnected, individuals must also create their own brands, but now the products are themselves (Castrillon). Which means that people have to take the features of social media, which allow you to curate your life, and take it to the most extreme end. Every tweet is an extension of your core ideas, every photo part of a larger story. The result is a precarious balancing act between the needs for personal branding and the truth of your interiority. There is always the danger of relying too much on branding as an end to itself. For a more exaggerated example of this, I always think of the character of Tom Haverford from Parks and Rec (played by Aziz Anzari). The character serves as a sort of parody of younger generations and their relationship...

  The internet has expanded the way businesses interact with their consumer base. For example, before the Internet, crowdsourcing, the practice of asking people online to offer solutions to a problem would have been unthinkable. Most literature I have read about crowdsourcing, however, tends to focus on engineering or marketing, and does not acknowledge how fields such as music, entertainment, and media could benefit from this mind set. This is a real shame, as these fields already experience a similar phenomenon called fandom they could tap into. Modern fandom can be defined as a group of people uniting into a strongly defined community over their shared love for a piece of media. This appreciation manifests in the form of written work (fanfiction) art (fanart) or video/audio pieces that tie into or contribute to the relevant property. Fandom has its roots in the 1960s, when fans of sci-fi stories such as Star Trek would hold convention or create fanzines. What allowed this type...

  As online spaces become the dominant setting for communication, discussion, and discourse in human society, we need to reassess the role social media plays in news. While these spaces are prime places for professionals to update people about the world, it is also an ideal environment for disinformation to spread. The freedom and anonymity of the Internet often removes the sense of culpability that traditional avenues of news often have built into them. To properly ascertain this situation, three questions need answering. First, what are the major sources of news online. Second, why are they becoming the new source of authority? Third, who has the power to address these issues and what should they do to minimize the tide of misleading information. The first question can be difficult to address, because in theory, anyone can be a source of news online. Anyone can post video or photos of a major event that informs the national or worldwide narrative surrounding it. Thankfully, aft...

  In the sci-fi thriller Ghost in the Shell (the 1995 animated movie, not the 2017 live action-remake) there is a confounding scene of a series of seemingly unrelated images of a futuristic city that does not immediately add to the plot. Instead of progressing the story, the film takes its time to contrast different elements of the environment and allow the audience to see older building and modern technology combine to create a distinct city. Far from being random, this sequence reinforces the themes at the center of the film, the way technology changes our perception to identity and its relationship to the physical (Nerdwirter1). This idea, that humanity must reevaluate itself with the advent of a digital world, is present in the entirety of the cyberpunk genre, which combines the cynicism and dirty urban landscapes of 1940s noir films with societal distrust of emerging technology and the institutions that abuse them. Another Japanese film, Akira , shows its characters redefin...