Digital Media and Society postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

A woman came into the phone repair shop where I work with a cracked handset and one request. She did not mind losing her photos, because they were backed up, but she needed her WhatsApp chats moved across, because they held the only record of conversations with her late husband. The transfer took forty minutes, and for most of that time she stood at the counter watching the progress bar. I have done dozens of these transfers since, and I have noticed that people rarely ask about storage or camera quality. They ask whether their group chats, voice notes and saved passwords will survive. Questions like these, about what digital platforms hold for people and on whose terms, are why I want to pursue postgraduate study in digital media and society.

My undergraduate degree in English Language and Linguistics gave me methods for looking closely at how people communicate. For my dissertation I analysed around four hundred public comments in a town community Facebook group, all posted during the six weeks after the local council announced cuts to an evening bus route. After gaining ethics approval and anonymising every comment, I coded them for stance, use of personal narrative and replies to other users. The most interesting pattern was not anger at the council. It was how quickly the discussion split into practical sub-threads, with people offering lifts, comparing taxi prices and sharing a petition. A few highly active members shaped which posts gained replies at all. I came away with a good mark and a clear sense of my method's limits. Discourse analysis showed me what was said, but not how the platform's ordering of comments or the group's moderation rules influenced who was heard. I want to study those structures properly.

Reading beyond my course has pushed me in the same direction. danah boyd's It's Complicated helped me think about teenagers' use of social media as a negotiation of networked publics rather than a simple story of addiction or danger. Shoshana Zuboff's idea of surveillance capitalism was useful too, though I found myself wanting more evidence about how ordinary users actually experience data collection. That gap between large theories and everyday practice is where I would like to focus.

Outside work I volunteer every Tuesday afternoon at a digital help drop-in run by my local library. Most visitors are older people trying to book GP appointments online, update a bus pass or join a family video call. I am not a trainer, and my role is simply to sit alongside people and explain one step at a time. It has shown me how much public services now assume a smartphone and a confident user. One man came for three weeks running to practise logging in to his council tax account, and by the third week he did it without me touching the screen. Small sessions like that have made me interested in digital exclusion as a policy question as well as a personal one.

I also sing tenor in a community choir, which has little to do with media, except that I agreed last year to manage our mailing list and rehearsal recordings. It is a modest job, but it taught me to organise information for sixty people with very different levels of technical comfort.

At postgraduate level I hope to combine the close textual skills from my degree with stronger training in qualitative research methods, platform studies and research ethics. My longer-term aim is to work in research or policy on digital inclusion, perhaps for a local authority or charity. I am organised and patient, and I am curious about the ordinary ways people live with technology. I would bring those qualities, and my experience on both sides of the counter, to the course.