So I was having a conversation with a guy at the bar last night. If I’m honest I had quite a lot to drink at this point but then British history is built upon alcohol and other questionable substances.

The guy I spoke to, called Alec, is taking an illustration degree and decided to focus on political comics for his assignment. Unfortunately the only two political structures he was familiar with was Fascism and Nihilism. Even though I don’t know much politics he asked me a few questions and he even requested for my email address encase he had more during the week.

We got into conversation about how influences effect the decisions we make. The technical term of the stance he took would be hard determinism. However, he went a step further. He started talking about how even the existential occurrences of nature could affect our very essence. With this I had to disagree and refer to how it is definitely the empirical nature of events which shape us. Existential happenings are beyond our reach which we can only explain through theories and evidence. The existence of evidence then makes our views of existential events plausible, it is the empirical which can only be labelled as the truth. Anything beyond this has to be taken as a value of faith, including any scientific theories which are purely logical in thought and currently lack physical evidence.

Anyway, this discussion relates very well with how Public Relations operates. In PR’s simplest form the communication of a particular message is the focus. However this message has to be taken from a value of faith. There are very few messages where PR can attain the benefit of empirical evidence to prove a certain point. The only industry which comes to my mind where PR could provide evidence is in regards to health and safety. The harmful effects of tobacco can be communicated referring back to scientific discoveries. This is unlike the messages from an organisation wishing(…)

The news has recently been inundated with reports from the new social networking website on the block, Twitter. George Orwell spoke of how it is always better to write a simple sentence in the media. Perhaps this is why Twitter has taken off so well with the public?

Twitter is quite simply a ludicrously easy social networking device to use. Due to this simplicity the scale of use for this social networking tool is huge. As the Twitter website explains, the focus is on a particular question “What are you doing?” The most basic function of Twitter is to answer this question. Obviously this question implies a focus around daily routines, the less understanding around Twitter may joke with statuses such as “Eating a ham sandwich” or “Reading a book”. Fair enough, a lot of Twitter does include people writing such phrases, I am included in this.

The secret behind Twitter is to use the tool for your own advantage. It is no secret that there is a degree of selfishness in all social networking website. The only reason I am on Facebook is to stay in the loop with my friends. An individual must always gain something from signing up. Twitter is the blatantly obvious when it comes to personal gain since it is possible to share your articles, artwork or music immediately with a large network of people. Even if a person has a low amount of followers it is possible to use ‘#’ tags to shout certain tweets to a large audience. For instance the #bloggeries gives your posted article links increased coverage. Yesterday for Charles Darwin’s 200^th Birthday the #darwin tag was used to list all birthday message to him. It is a simple but convenient method to get more exposure for your tweets and join in with a likewise audience.

Getting more followers?

First you can add me @michaelwhite1!

This is a common question for anybody who takes Twitter seriously. Nobody(…)

With all my controversial articles I issue a sort of disclaimer at the beginning. This usually begins with a submission to experience and perhaps necessary knowledge. In this case though I can introduce this article as a member of generation Y, along with a deep passion caused by an inadvertently misspent childhood.

As this is an introductory blog post I’ll provide some geeky details about myself. Like most young boys I had a fascination with computer games. This later grew with a desire to programme such software and so I leant the ‘lighter’ programming language gml which is a bit like Delphi. I quickly became involved with internet languages such as html, css, php, perl and mysql. I have helped develop a few websites over the years, a small portion of which were successful. Then I caught the writer’s flu, became obsessed with journalism and now my pr course compliments my passions.

I love gadgets, social media and one medium in particular, the internet. I won’t delve into the history of the internet, I’m sure you all know enough about that. My focus will be upon personalities on the internet. This will, no doubt, come with mild cynicism. I suppose that is what happens when studying media and public relations!

There is a cliché remark which separates older and current generation. It is simply,

“In my day we had more fun, we met each other and occasionally spoke on the telephone.”

The internet is one of the reasons why there is a small rift between the generations. The majority of teenagers will sit on social networking websites and chat their time away. What I have noticed over the years is how internet communication can give an individual multiple personalities.

The personality on one social networking website may differ to the next or at least make it appear so. A basic analogy of this would be to focus upon specialised websites. I’m a member of the popular music scrobbling website LastFm. As my preferred genre of music(…)

Last Tuesday I was asked by my course leader at the University of Gloucestershire to show new students around the campus. The students had arrived to be interviewed for the PR course and it occurred to me that exactly this time last year I was having my interview for the very same course. Five we meant to have come but only four turned up. Unfortunately we had a heavy snow storm during the night and so a couple of families admitted to being unsure about making the journey.

Interestingly the four who had made it were all girls which fulfilled the stereotype that PR is a female dominated industry. We had such a discussion in class about a month ago without any real conclusion. However, from what I have seen, the majority of professionals do seem to be females. Perhaps this is because women have all the right emotional parts of the brain to deal with effective communication? Anyway, I’m not entirely certain. What I am sure about was the prospective students I showed around the university, with another student called Amelia, were charming. We had some interesting discussions about the course and I can see them all fitting in. The only question I was unable to answer was about the clubs in town, I hate clubs.

Due to how the interviews panned out I ended up guiding two of the prospective students back to reception. On the way I sneakily and sleekly inquired how they thought their interview went. Both of the girls seemed to be happy with the whole ordeal.