Midterm reflection post

Question: How has creating your own website made you think about "digital media culture" differently? (250-500)

Before creating my own website, my digital media culture revolved mainly around Facebook, Instagram and occasionally Snapchat. Since 2 years ago, I have been archiving various posts on my private Facebook group, ranging from funny videos, aesthetics to inspirational art pieces. The main reason behind such massive effort and archive is to attain as much inspiration as possible in creating my own content. Some day I am going to be creating contents to share my identity, thoughts and views about the world. In doing so, archiving numerous ideas and posts was a rather natural act.

Establishment of this website is the very first content I published since the Facebook archiving began. I had a brief idea on the overall design and layout. I felt more than prepared before clicking 'Create my page' button on the wix.com page. The reality was harder than I imagined. Learning how to properly use the website tools was not a big issue. The bigger issue was that I did not have any satisfying pictures or arts in my Facebook archives and my photo album to use as background image. Browsing through hundreds of self-taken photos of nature, people, food and arts in my phone, I could not find a single one that would fit my website. Running out of patience, I selected a random photo to use as my background. Nevertheless, I was not satisfied and I still am not satisfied.

Such experience made me realize the pain of being the 'creator'. Someone once told me the excruciating pain of content creators, who have to be genuine and creative in producing own work for living. Compared to them, I am merely creating a website for one of my many college courses. Yet, I felt extensive stress and dissatisfaction in my own work. Sharing photos of my travel journal, 1 Michelin-star restaurant in Tokyo on my social media was a rudimentary work in my digital media culture. I now clearly understands how "creating original content" would elevate my digital media to the next level. While writing this reflection post, I have already deleted around 50 posts in my Facebook archive. Having the experience of creating a website, I now know what are the posts and ideas that would be practically helpful to me in the future. Creating this website taught me the harsh reality of where I am right now and how far I am standing from the goal.