Before taking this course, I did not think very deeply about digital media. I use social media and AI tools pretty often, so I had slowly started to treat them as normal parts of everyday life. I mostly saw them as tools that people use, not as systems that actively shape how we think, how we present ourselves, or what we pay attention to. Looking back now, I think that is the biggest thing that changed for me over the semester. I no longer see digital media as neutral. I now think it plays a much bigger role in shaping identity, attention, and the way people understand both themselves and others.
The part of the course that stayed with me most was the work on AI selfies and digital identity. That was probably the moment when the course started to feel much more personal to me. Before this class, I usually thought of selfies as something simple. Even if they were edited, filtered, or carefully chosen, I still thought they mainly reflected how someone wanted to show themselves. But when I worked on my own AI selfie project, I started to realize that self-representation online is never fully under personal control. Even when I tried to guide the image through my prompt, the final result was still shaped by the system itself. The image did not just show what I wanted it to show. It also reflected the logic of the platform, including the way it organizes identity through labels, data, and visual assumptions.
That project changed the way I think about digital identity in a much more direct way than I expected. Before, I probably would have said that identity online is curated, but I still would have assumed that the person using the platform has the main control. Now I think that is only partly true. The user makes choices, but those choices happen inside a system that already has its own structure, categories, and preferences. In my case, that became obvious when the image started to feel less like a personal selfie and more like a version of me that had already been sorted and interpreted by a platform. That was uncomfortable, but it was also what made the project meaningful.
The other major topic that changed the way I think was misinformation. Before this course, I mostly associated misinformation with politics, conspiracy theories, or major news events. I thought of it as something serious, but also something separate from the kinds of content people see every day. What stood out to me in this class, especially through readings like Shin and Rubin, was that misinformation is also about how people come to trust things online in the first place. It is not only about whether something is true or false. It is also about familiarity, presentation, repetition, and the way platforms encourage quick reactions. That made the topic feel much closer to everyday life.
This changed the way I think about social media because it made me realize how often credibility is created through style rather than substance. A post can feel trustworthy because it looks polished, sounds confident, or fits into a format people are used to seeing. It can also feel believable because it matches what people already expect or want to hear. That idea stayed with me because it made me reflect on my own habits. I realized that I also react quickly to content that feels familiar, relatable, or visually convincing. I do not always stop right away to think about why something feels credible. After this module, I became much more aware that trust online is often shaped before people even evaluate the actual content carefully.
I think these two parts of the course connected more than I expected. The selfie project made me think about how platforms shape identity, while the misinformation module made me think about how platforms shape belief. In both cases, the main lesson for me was that digital media does not just carry information. It also frames it. It shapes how people are seen, how messages are received, and what starts to feel normal or believable. That is probably the biggest takeaway I will keep from this course.
Overall, I think this course made me slower and more reflective in the way I move through digital spaces. I pay more attention now to how platforms shape identity, how certain kinds of content become believable, and how online expression is never as simple as it first seems. I do not think this course made me reject social media or AI, but it definitely changed the way I think about them. More than anything, I think it made me more aware of how much digital media is involved in shaping everyday life, even in moments that seem ordinary.
Comments
Post a Comment