Why do I heart media? Do I even heart media?
I have always loved creating. And I always loved sharing.
Maybe it sounds pretentious, but I think that there is someone who cares about the things I have to show and tell or just that my content can enrich somebodies’ life.
As for many boys of the age around 11 or 12 years, my journey with social media started with Gaming content. The early 2010’s – the rise of games like Minecraft and the videos about them began. I spent hours of my life figuring out, how to get the best audio out of my 20 Dollar headset or to get a screen record software running. I just wanted to be like the ‘big guys’, that had thousands of people watching them playing a video game. Today I can only smile about that. Such insignificant content, when I look at that from now. But that time taught me something: I love media. I love people doing what they love. Presenting it to the world has been made possible by this fast-growing thing that gets everyone connected – the Internet, or to be specific – social media.
I think that time has brought up a generation with an insane amount of media competence, that can’t be taken away. We took weeks and months to teach ourselves very professional image, video, music or 3D software like Cinema4D, Premiere Pro, Photoshop or FL Studio.
Just because we wanted to create, maybe just because we wanted to see numbers go up and higher, as humans just like that. And sometimes we made a fairly good amount of money by selling design work in exchange for Paysafe Cards, just to blow that money on our Steam account to buy games, we shouldn’t be allowed to play. My journey went on. After some, for the lack of better words, ‘shitposting’ I went on.
With me starting to ride mountain bike, there was no doubt that I won’t be making videos about that. Exactly this was the time when my interest in producing professional media content really started. Everything before this time has rather been a boy producing amateur content creation, sometimes for a little bit of money. I got myself a good full-frame camera, paired with some 30-year-old lenses I found in my parent’s basement. It was difficult to get a nice picture due to the lack of auto focus function, especially when recording extreme-sport footage. When I was recording the first video for my channel, I didn’t know anything about filming, so I just went for it. Some people who were filming too made fun of me, because they didn’t believe a first timer with such a non-beginner friendly camera rig could create anything good. After many hours of editing, because I had to make all transition effects by myself, the video was done and today it has around 4000 views, which isn’t that much if you consider this video is around four years old, but most of the attention was three years ago.
More and more, people that didn’t know me in real life were watching my videos, which seemed just crazy to me. I realized, that I can actually reach people with my content. And my friends, who were also biking, were crediting me for my filming and editing skills.
Today, that stuff is still just oversaturated, overedited and amateur stuff.
Soon after school, I gained first experience as a self-employed Videoeditor, Photoeditor and Designer for the international market. I enjoyed working for clients all across the world, just with the skills I taught myself. I think this is the most interesting thing about kids from the early generation z and millennials too, that we grew up in a time, were sharing media was already a thing, but the path to it still required professional software to create things.
In today’s digital media, everything is created in minutes or seconds, just because it became so easy to just mask out something, using an app on your smartphone that facilitates your work. That the world came that far, of course is an astonishing technological masterpiece, but does make a lot of creative work that took many hours seem natural. Still, even this can be good, as nowadays we are focusing more on the creative aspects than the tools, when we are trying to create something. “The best camera is the camera that you own” is a statement, which can teach us a lot about digital creative work.
I moved on, made my living off working self-employed in that industry for a certain time until I realised, that this maybe isn’t the right thing for me. I always dreamed of making my money with social media, being my own boss and create content about the things I love to get more other people to enjoy them with me.
Started creating YouTube Videos about building mechanical keyboards, became quite successful regarding the niche tha I’m in. I realised that there are a lot of things about media that I wanna find out more about.
My path to social media and to my current motivation for this study, has already been a long journey. What used to be more of a practical testing and discovery of possible fields of work, I now question and analyze.
Student number: 13834541
Why I Heart My Media 