The creation of this podcast stemmed from my interest in the correlation between politics as we see it and our usage of digital media and I wanted to further research this in an in-depth manner to better my understanding of it as a whole. In particular, a huge focus when concerned with digital media was the usage of social media. This includes, and is not limited to messaging websites such as Facebook, micro-blogging applications such as twitter, photo and video sharing tools such as Instagram and much more. All of us have either used these apps or similar ones in some part of our day to day lives and a massive chunk of us continue to do so each and every day. As a result of the general population worldwide being so heavily invested in social media, politicians have now resorted to these means to reach out to wider audiences and spread their influence. Digital media, including social media has had such an impact on the way contemporary politics exists in this era and has redefined what democracy truly is.
In this podcast, I touched upon topics that included the actual link between digital/social media and politics, ways in which politicians and political parties used these tools to reach out to target populations, how effective these methods truly were, perceptions of social media users when concerned with the rise of political information on social media websites and applications and the drawbacks that came alongside social media’s overall influence on politics.
The more research I conducted on this topic, the more I came to understand how digital media as a whole shaped the current political atmosphere. A huge chunk of my focus with my research was towards the political scene in the United States of America and political campaigns that have occurred over there. I was able to discover, while researching, that politicians in the United States spent a sizable amount of money on social media advertising over the years to attract certain target populations and was also able to find out that there was a general level of discontentment from many social media users over the sheer amount of political content on social media and how many believed all of this was partisan and bias-ridden.
The creation of this Podcast was rather simple, as a matter of fact. While I did not have the best quality tools or software to assist me with its creation, I was still nonetheless able to produce what I could with the resources I had, which were my phone microphone, my laptop and Movavi editor. In terms of the Creative Commons licensed source material, I hopped onto ccmixter.org and was able to find the right music for my intro and outro, and felt that it was able to add to my already existing podcast.
There weren’t too many challenges to this task, however, I did feel like I was rushed with time overall as this was something which required extensive amounts of research and I do think that I could have done this in a far more productive manner. I also did struggle at first to find subtopics to discuss when concerned with the correlation between social media and contemporary politics. However, I discovered that through research I was able to find the answers to all the questions I had and was also able to develop a far more extensive knowledge of the topics at hand, thus not only contributing to the creation of my podcast but also my overall knowledge of how these two topics overlapped.
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