Hi! I’m Monique and I am currently a graduate student at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. I hope to receive my MFA in Strategic Communication or New Media in the Summer of 2011. I am also working in the Marketing Department at Schlitterbahn Waterparks as a Corporate Communications Coordinator/Marketing Assistant. My ultimate goal is to work for an Advertising or Public Relations agency after receiving my MFA.
The time I have spent at Schlitterbahn has changed my ideas of the world of new media. For the first time I am seeing how new media plays a role in a business model and can be used for a variety of different reasons. While I was an undergrad new media was just coming into the picture, and many of us were just using it to keep in touch with friends from High School and post pictures of our weekends. We were beginning to learn about it in our classes but I had never been on the “inside” to see how it was being used by professionals. Now, as a marketing professional, I can see the practical applications of new media and how it is changing the way can use social media in our business models.
In “From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technology” author Dennis Barron tells about the time he realized he could no longer “draft anything coherent directly on a piece of paper.” Realizations like this are at the root of new media technology. Where once normal tasks seem foreign and new interactive ideas have become the way of life.
The rise of new media has changed the way we interact with each other and the world around us. New media is anything that changes the way we interact with traditional media and has an impact on society. Because of the imapct of new media we no longer just read a newspaper article. We can now interact with the information we recive. We can go online to find more information about the story, we tweet about it with our friends, maybe write a blog post about the issue, post a link to the article on our Facebook page and then engage in comments from people we may have never seen in person. The process through which we receive our information is not only faster, but completely different and interactive. however, the premise remains the same. New Media follows the structure of traditional media in that it is still a means to get information to the public, but the social interaction has changed the we function in our everyday lives.
