RED ROOM: AN UNCONVENTIONAL SOCIAL MEDIA

Hello everybody, I’m Vera, an exchange student coming from the University of Bologna, Italy! I’ve arrived in Wollongong last week and I am so excited of being here and experience life at UOW! In these few days I met a lot of australians with parents or relatives from my country, especially from Calabria, that is so close to my region (I live in Puglia, south east of Italy). So, I can say that I feel almost home!

I’m living at International House, that is one of the university accomodation, in the North Wollongong, together with hundreds of students coming from everywhere. Amazing!

It is my first english written post in the blog, hope my italian readers won’t get annoyed! I’ve opened this blog around two years ago and it is for me a space where sharing opinions about what happens, feelings and moods about my life. Besides, I sometime post poems that I wrote ( I’m not a poet but I love poetry).
My blog heading is “Metà del cielo” which means “halfway to the sky”, that is an expression used by the Brazilian prime minister Dilma Roussef to depict the rule of women in our society. Women are halfway to the sky and halfway to the earth, they balance dreams and needs of the world. Such a  beautiful thought!

Anyway, in this post I’m going to describe a really nice media space: the red room in my student house. The red room is the place in which we use to see tv shows or movies together (name derives from the colour of the floor, which is red indeed). That’s a so charming space because it creates good opportunities to socialize with other students and have pleasant time all together. During movies we use to swap bowls with pop-corn and mumble. Besides, there are many cosy sofa, so we can also relax!

What about the choice of what to see on the tv?  It is so difficult to find out something that meets the tastes of everybody! At this purpose, our mentors everyday post on our facebook group some ideas about shows or movies to see and we are asked to comment  (a sort of vox pop).

Last night we watched “Bad Teacher” with a so exciting Cameron Diaz in the shoes of an irriverent and lazy teacher! So funny movie, it was a great night and we seriously died laughing! Tonight they are broadcasting bicycle racing, that is not so exciting for me but I will surely enjoy myself anyway!
In effect, what really matters is having a nice time with other students, so the red room is just the good place to spend a great night and make new friends! It is a media space, a social space, a friendly space!

The red room is an unconventional social media. Nowadays we use to refer to social media as virtual spaces like Facebook or Twitter, where sharing ideas, pictures and have conversation with people from everywhere. Real and virtual spaces become the same thing and we take part to this new world without realising! We become the protagonist of this world and we plan our life according to social media trend.

From: http://raffaelepizzari.com/internet/social-media-come-plasmano-la-tua-vita/

Thus I’ve decided to speak about the red room of my student house. I’d like to describe possible realities out of social media, which can give us the same opportunities and a good taste of life out of our personal computers or smartphones. As the academic Pippa Norris pointed out in “A Virtuous Circle? Political Communications in Post-Industrial Democracies” , we live in a postmodern era and social media are the basis of our everyday life. Nevertheless, this era exhortes us also to return to physical contact with people, to public conversations as Grecians taught us with the image of the Agorà. In this case we could speak about a 2.0 Agorà made up of people who use social media to keep in contact and than they meet up somewhere. That’s the point and that’s what I would try to discuss in my further posts.

Sun, smiles and great time with friends!