Keeping Up With Kayleigh

During the past two class meetings we have been watching "The Social Dilemma" which is a short documentary distributed by Netflix. This documentary was released in September 2020 and was directed by Jeff Orlowski. I have seen clips of "The Social Dilemma" on TikTok before, but I never sat down and watched the full documentary before this class. I normally am not the type of person who likes to sit down and watch a documentary in class because I always get tired and distracted. However, this documentary somehow enthralled me and I was intrigued the whole time while watching it. Throughout "The Social Dilemma" we hear from many experts who previously worked in the social media field and now want to inform users of the dangers that social media brings. The main theme of this documentary seems to be how severely addicting all social media platforms are and how these networks manipulate their users to purposefully become addicted to their phones for the company...

As I promised last week in my blog, I want to walk you through the opening weekend of "9 to 5"! Since I posted my last blog we finished our last two nights of tech rehearsal on Thursday and Friday. On Friday night we had our traditional invited dress rehearsal. This is where anyone in the theatre arts department is welcome to come watch our rehearsal and the cast can invite close friends. This allows the cast and crew to perform for a small audience before we officially open a show. It is very helpful and gives us a way to get our nerves out before having a full audience.  Invited dress had a few bumps along the way, but we worked through them and it helped prepare us to open the show on Saturday night! After the last dress rehearsal we fixed what went wrong and went over our director and choreographers notes and got out of rehearsal at 12 a.m. It was a very late night, but they got through everything we needed to so we wouldn't have to come in early before the show the n...

We are officially at the busiest time of the semester! The last month of school is insane and I find myself struggling to keep up at times. I have been dealing with a mystery sickness for the last two weeks and it has really taken a toll on me which hasn't been helpful at all! After three different appointments at the health center, they finally put me on antibiotics so I am hoping that it helps get whatever this sickness is out of my system. On top of being sick, we are now in the busiest and most crucial part of "9 to 5". We began tech week this past Saturday and spent our weekend in two 10-hour rehearsals. For those of you who are not well-educated in the theatre world, tech week is basically the week leading up to the opening of a show. The cast and crew spend this week in very long rehearsals and many late nights working on putting all aspects of the show together. This includes working with lighting, sound, costumes, spacing, orchestra and more. It is a giant proces...

As we are nearing the end of the semester we are approaching the final chapters in our textbook for this social media class! One of the newest platforms in the social media world is TikTok. This platform is among the most popular for teens and the younger generation. Many spend countless hours daily scrolling through the latest trends and new content posted by popular creators.  For those who may not know what TikTok is, it is a video-sharing content platform. It has grown over the last few years and now has many different features. TikTok is a Chinese-owned platform that was released in August of 2018. After 3 months of being released, it became the third most downloaded app in the world. As of last year TikTok reached over one billion monthly active users worldwide. It hosts the majority of the 18-24 age group and has more female users rather than male.  TikTok users average about 95 minutes of daily usage and is the #6 most popular social media platform. An average user spe...

YouTube is a very popular video platform and has been for as long as I can remember! I remember as a kid I would watch so many different creators all the time. It is a platform that hosts one-third of the entire internet and is only getting more popular with time. According to YouTube, their mission is "to give everyone a voice and show them the world." They do exactly that by letting each user post whatever content they would like to, which helps entertain many different audiences. Today I specifically wanted to talk about how to optimize your YouTube videos. In order to use YouTube to its fullest capabilities, you have to be sure to optimize each video to get the most views possible. According to our textbook the first 24 hours are the most crucial to a video's success, so it must be fully optimized before being published.  Some key things to help optimize your video are as follows; keywords, titles, descriptions, closed captions, tags, thumbnails, cards, end screens an...

At this point in the semester I am completely burnt out! We have had lots of challenges throughout the process of "9 to 5", I have been getting sick constantly and school is at the busiest time of the semester! Because of all these challenges, a long weekend was very much needed! Thanks to the rare total solar eclipse we got an extra day off! I figured for this blog post I would take you through what I did with my long weekend. After classes on Friday I had to register for next semester's classes and if any of you know the process here at ONU, it is very stressful! Luckily I got into most of the classes that I wanted and I am just happy it is over! I grabbed dinner quickly and then headed to a meeting with the company of "9 to 5". We discussed some changes that were happening and then jumped straight into rehearsals for the rest of the evening. We had rehearsal until 10 p.m. and then a bunch of us decided to go to The Cask Room for karaoke night! When we got the...

Pinterest was founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp in November 2009. This platform was very slow growing compared to other social media platforms, but it now has an average of 445 million monthly users.  Pinterest is a platform that follows a pinboard-style network and allows users to discover and pin ideas onto their personalized boards. A pin is a visual with an online link embedded in it so that when a user clicks that visual it takes them to a website to learn more about that pin. As far as numbers go, Pinterest has a predominant group of Women users. This platform is currently ranked #15 of the most popular social media platforms. There are several different pin formats that can be used for brands to reach their target audience. These formats are static pins, video pins, rich pins, collections, idea pins, try on product pins and takes. You can also set up a Pinterest shop on this platform as a way to grow your business! In order to start a business Pinterest ...

We are getting to the point in the semester that everyone is burnt out and patiently waiting for the end of the semester. Every break we get is needed and these breaks are the only reason some of us are making it through! Although we just got back from spring break a few weeks ago, I was so ready for Easter break. Unfortunately, I could not go home for Easter since it was too long of a drive for a short break, but my friend Lenore was kind enough to invite me home with her for the weekend! My other friend Ella also lives too far away to go home, so Lenore's parents kindly opened their home to both of us. We left early Friday morning and began our 5-hour drive. Lenore lives in a suburb of Chicago, and I was excited to go since I'd never been to Illinois before! It was so refreshing to get off campus for a few days and be in a city and not stuck in Ohio surrounded by cornfields. I was a little sad that this would be my first Easter away from home and that all my family would be t...