My Public - Blog Post 1 (DTC 356)

I’m going to explain a little about myself and then place myself into a public setting that would broadly define who I am and what my interests are. Currently, I am a female college student, studying Digital Technology and Culture and am part of the LGBTQ+ community. In my free time, I like to play video games, watch anime and cartoons, while also drawing every now and then. I also stream horror, indie, and platformer games on Tuesdays and Saturdays, while balancing my school and work life. I plan to start creating video content to post to YouTube and TikTok to grow my platform there. I’m an avid user of TikTok and love getting lost in the short videos and feeling inspired to post more.

More about my childhood, I grew up in a decently conservative town and I couldn’t have been more excited to leave and come to Washington State University. There wasn’t a lot of diversity in my hometown, and I didn’t have much experience with anyone else other than white people. Coming to Pullman was a culture shock for me, and I’ve learned so much already only being here for three (minus one because of COVID) years. Speaking of COVID, having to isolate with my parents for 8 straight months with no outside interaction besides the occasional trip to the store did a number on my mental health. It had already been pretty bad, and quarantining did not help. But I am doing much better now.

Since I started streaming, I’ve started to grow my own community very slowly and knowing people actually enjoy my content makes me happy to know I’m making other people smile. I started in February of 2021, and I’ve come a long way since then. With over 100 followers and a consistent 10+ subscribers, I feel inspired every stream to keep going and pumping out content. I can’t wait to see what happens in the future and if I can keep up with my goals.

Before researching the different topics about me, I’ll be using constant keywords of “streaming”, “depression”, “gaming”, and “Twitch”. The two social media applications I’ll be using to research these keywords are TikTok and Twitter. Starting with TikTok and looking at what comes up after searching my keywords, I noticed a common theme among each search. The most closely related terms were streaming, gaming, and Twitch, where the videos recommended and at the top of the search page all related to gaming and games to play. More specifically, streaming presented more videos about what to buy and not buy for streams, what to know before you start streaming, and how to make donations work in streams. As for Twitch, the “Top” page was just promoting popular users and videos with the most likes and this seemed to be mainly female streamers and vtuber streamers. Then, for the gaming section, we see a majority of verified gaming clips, video game clips, and different gaming equipment and machinery. One thing I found weird was how the “Video” tab contained basically all the videos being promoted in the “Top” page and that the users, overall, only brought up users whose profile names mentioned the term I searched. For the other three topics, depression really had nothing showing besides users and I think it’s because TikTok tries to limit what the app considers inappropriate from being shown to users.

While searching through Twitter, I was a little surprised to see the “streaming” term only bring up music streaming from the K-Pop group, BTS. When I searched the word, I was expecting to see more twitch streaming and gaming like I did in TikTok. Then, moving onto “depression”, I was expecting a much larger turnout of content than TikTok showed me, and I was not disappointed. On the “Top” page, there was a decent amount of depression awareness and trying to teach people more about depression, while also pushing different studies scientists have done on mice regarding depression. The “Latest” page includes users talking about their seasonal depression and why there is such thing as seasonal depression. Next, searching gaming brought up more professional gaming and Esports organizations than regular gaming, or newest game releases. I also saw a lot of popular Youtubers and Streamers and their tweets. Although I said there weren’t any newest game releases, I did see a promotion from a user posting about a Steam sale for a game they were interested in. But, other than that, it’s a lot of professional esports gaming. Finally, Twitch. At the top of the search, there are streamers promoting a new “camp” for different streamers to come together and collab for different planned events and provide more content for their viewers. The Twitch platform verified account is also being presented at the top for users to check out for recent Twitch updates and popular streamers. Overall, from the public I choose was pretty broad, especially in this day and age, but I think comparing both platforms show how the different apps are meant to create media for a variety of users, regardless of their age, gender, sexual orientation, or interests.

After reading through “Small Change”, I would say the internet, period, has made participatory culture so much easier for people to get included. For example, if someone from a community likes to draw, but no one from their town likes to draw, if the person goes online, they can find a whole new community of people who do like to draw, thus making the person from the town feel welcomed. Social media has made it simple for anyone to post and follow anything that interests them; these large streamers and content creators live on the internet and make entertaining content for all the viewers. Thus, creating a following large enough to start activism events and group people together on (sometimes) specific reasoning and mindset.