How has the rise of social media impacted contemporary politics in beneficial and problematic ways?

https://soundcloud.com/jocelyn-kurniawan/alm101-a3

When creating my podcast, I decided to choose the topic question "How has the rise of social media impacted contemporary politics in beneficial and problematic ways?".

Since the unit coordinator found the case study of Ahok interesting, which was done in the exercises given on lectures, to be inserted to the podcast; I decided to choose that route. To be honest, I'm not a fan of politics at the start but I wanted something that challenged me and so I took the topic question. I started planning the necessary points by mentioning social media's benefits and limitations regarding politics. I started with how social media could reach a wide range of people as an advantage and how it could hinder privacy as well as leaked rumours circulating as a disadvantage.

I gathered a few scholarly sources to include credible quotations and opinions regarding the usage of social media in the public sphere, specifically on politics, which I found straightforwardly from pdf files as well as Research Gate.

When creating the script and reading through it, I wanted a balance opinion upon the benefits as well as limitations to politics as possible. There were so much real life situation cases, and summarising it into 600 words was difficult. I found that an interview is not needed as there are many case studies both locally and internationally that I could grow upon that idea.

The strategy that I used when recording my podcast was through voice memo on my iPhone. It was frustrating as I'm a perfectionist that I had to record several times to find the best clip. Afterwards, I compiled all the recordings into one as well as attaching music intro and outro in iMovie, which I then saved as an audio mp3 file. Then, I uploaded to SoundCloud as seen above.

What I got from doing this assignment is I realised how impactful social media is to all parts of the world, which includes politics. I realised how evolved we are right now with the existence of social media. Therefore, we have to be careful on what we have to say in social media, think before posting otherwise backlashes are going to come.

Challenges I encountered when creating this podcast would be recording myself, as I mentioned above sometimes I would slip through words that I tend to repeat it over and over since I'm a perfectionist that results in so much time that was taken. Another was to use indirect quotations for referencing my sources. It was my first time ever doing so and hopefully it turns out to be the correct way.

Hope you enjoyed both my video as well as this blog post and gained a new perspective regarding the chosen topic.