HOME n.
Definitions of “
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hen starting the second year as IBCoM students we have the amazing opportunity to choose certain courses ourselves out of a range of various fields according to our personal interest. One course I am going to introduce to you now is SMPI, which stands for Social Media, Prosumption and Identity. The course content takes a theoretical approach to what we take for granted nowadays – our activity on social media. You examine closely what involves the portrayal of ourselves on social media, what sharing pictures and updating statuses mean in a bigger picture and how our identity is constructed by the way we share information about us, our activities, friends, food and everyday life. In order to experience and understand the concepts, which are essential to understanding this matter, students who take this course are required to keep working on a continuous blog over the period of the term. The assignment involves setting up and running a blog on social media, may that be an Instagram or Twitter account, that is up to you! The assignment provides a lot of freedom especially regarding the topic you want to blog about. You can choose whatever matters to you, something
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personal or something fun. Topics ranged from Rotterdam nightlife over food and smoothies to travel photography. While doing this assignment you are supposed to consciously create content on a regular bases throughout the course and observe the development of your blog, looking at likes, followers and response as much as the way it impacts you personally, your everyday life and personal habits. My peer student Roshni Hendrian started running an instagram account called “definitionsofhome” and she gained almost 100 followers over the course of 8 weeks. Roshni is half Indian half German and came to the Netherlands in Summer 2014 to study IBCoM. She loves travelling and experiencing new cultures and considers herself more or less as a social media addict (as probably most of us do right)! Thus she is aiming on finding an internship involving social media marketing and young audiences. Afterwards she hopes to get spot in Barcelona for exchange since she has never been to Spain before. How come she chose SMPI from so many other interesting courses? Roshni was so lucky to have some insider (ex-IBCoM student) rec-
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ommending the course! She also said that the appealing course description combined with her interest in social media determined her choice in the end. She also had deep interest to what extent social media affects us in the offline world as well. She said that “The assignment helped me understand my own social media habits much better, as well as understand how and why particular brands and established social media ‘people’ post what they post. It has really opened my eyes and the defintionsofhome assignment made it even more enjoyable!” The reason she chose the topic “definitions of home” for her practical assignment has to do with her personal background: With her multicultural family Roshni was never able to answer the question “Where is home?” properly since she spent her live in places of cultural extremities, such as Berlin and Dubai for example. She thought it was interesting to find out if fellow students also had particularly unique or conflicting definitions of home. As a result you get to pinch on what home means to students of the Erasmus University and what an IBCoM course can result into:
by Merle Ullrich