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Defining Your Medium

2:29 with Devin O'Bryan

There’s a phrase amongst those who study communications— ”The Medium is the Message”. We’ll use this video to help you best define the medium through which your message will most effectively travel.

New Terms:

  • Context -- the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.

Further Reading:

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    Context is the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or 0:00
    idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed. 0:06
    And let me tell you, context matters so much so 0:12
    that an entire field of study called, Media Theory, 0:15
    was created to better understand context when communicating. 0:20
    There was a man by the name of Marshall McLuhan who, in the 1960s, 0:25
    made famous the expression, the medium is the message. 0:30
    Which in lay persons terms roughly equates to, 0:33
    what you say can often be overshadowed by how you say it. 0:37
    Thanks to Mr. McLuhan and his famous expression we now know that each medium or 0:42
    channel of communication has it's own strengths and weaknesses. 0:47
    Same applies for when you want to deliver your body of work to an audience. 0:51
    Your message has to travel through a medium to your user. 0:58
    And that medium needs to be the most appropriate 1:03
    medium if you're going to be effective in communicating your message. 1:06
    For example, YouTube and Vimeo are greats if you have tons of video content. 1:10
    Behance or Dribbble work well if you're showing off visual design. 1:16
    A GitHub repo, it's great if you have dev work that you'd like to show off. 1:20
    LinkedIn is a perfect place to show your resume. 1:26
    And, finally, Medium and other blog formats are great if you have 1:29
    short to long form writing that you'd like to show off. 1:34
    But, perhaps, you wanna point out a little of everything I mentioned or, 1:38
    maybe, you don't care for some of these particular platforms. 1:42
    A self-hosted website is a nice place to get started, but 1:47
    understand that all of the previously mentioned 1:50
    platforms have built-in communities that you can leverage. 1:53
    There's certainly nothing wrong with hosting content on your own website while 1:56
    also posting your work to these respected platforms, 2:01
    especially if you link all of that work back to your website. 2:05
    Just be sure to take the advantage of the ability to tag your content if 2:08
    the feature exist because that helps with search engine optimization. 2:13
    Now that you've learned about choosing the appropriate places to show your work, 2:19
    let's move in to the next stage where we get into choosing the appropriate work 2:23
    to show. 2:28

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