Introductions

My name is Mark Ellison and this blog, "Freak Of Nature!," is actually starting as a project for my college course, Digital Media, Blogs, & Society.

I am a senior at the University of West Georgia hoping to graduate in the spring of 2011 with a bachelor's degree in Mass Communications and a minor in History. I am hoping to go into some kind of media production. I am from Powder Springs, Georgia.

I enrolled in Digital Media, Blogs, & Society at first because it was another three hours I could add to my total graduation credits and also because there were a limited number of classes available when I registered last spring. However, upon reading through the syllabus for this course, I feel that this course is one of the most relevant classes to the present being that it deals with online media and, more specifically, social networking sites. This latest outreach of the Internet is yet another platform for worldwide communication of which all of society can (and already does) benefit from. For businesses, it's a brand new arena for advertisement and customer feedback. Politically speaking, it's a brand new arena for elected officials to reach out to constituents during campaigning (whether for office or policy) or to debate each other during campaigning for office. The most recent example of this would be President Obama and his videos on YouTube as well as the McCain/Obama presidential debates covered by Facebook in partnership with ABC. At the most basic level, it provides an opportunity for individuals to connect with family and friends. My parents, for example, have reconnected with several of their friends from high school a long time ago in galaxy far, far away. I have met members of a branch of my family for the very first time. There are so many, for lack of a better term, "useful" uses with social media. I feel this course has much to offer me.