Introduction to Social Networking & Digital Media Blog

Hi and welcome to my Social Networking and Digital Media Academic Blog. During this series of blog posts I will monitor and evaluate how my chosen key influencer uses the social media platform ‘YouTube’ to communicate to his subscribers. I will therefore identify and engage with two main theories of digital communication and social networking to support my analysis of publicly available social media behaviours.

I have chosen the young beauty guru and entrepreneur, James Charles as my key influencer. James is one of the biggest beauty influencers on social media , with a combined following of over 20 million followers. Having been a follower of James, he is one of many who has inspired me to become a self-taught make — up artist myself.

Being one of YouTube’s leading Internet personalities, it is safe to say that James Charles leads a busy life, one not only filled with success but drama, because of this I believe that James makes for an interesting case study. After analysing James, I have decided to apply the theories of taught during week four Under Digital identity and performance , exploring Butler’s theory of Gender Performativity and Goffmann’s theory of Preservation of self in everyday life.

I am going to conduct my case study by observing James’s interacting with his audience on his videos from YouTube, Twitter and Instagram. I will use quantitative data to show how his career has advanced over the year. I have decided to use quantitative data in this case as it’s best used to quantify behaviours, opinions, attitudes and other variables to articulate facts and reveal patterns in research (Form plus 2020). I will also collect qualitative data from his YouTube videos to build on the persona he presents on this platform.

After reviewing the suggested Platform WordPress, Medium and Tumbler I have chosen to present my Blog on medium. I made this decision with the idea that being an academic blog medium would help me reach more people through it built in audience. It is also simple to use and has a huge group of readers who go to Medium specifically to read other people’s content. If you have quality content, you can reach those people through Medium’s website (Jackson,2020)