Personalization

From what I understood of Stephanie Ricker Schulte’s definition of the word, personalization is to make or change something your own in terms of your interests that you provide to the platform of personalizing. In her own words, “to personalize means to mark something to indicate that it belongs to a particular individual…or to change it in accordance with an individual’s preferences or needs” (Schulte P. 243). It could be confused with ‘customization,’ which she clarifies in her essay the difference being it by you and being it from you. When you customize something, you are changing it in your own likes and tastes, the result of the product being by you. Personalizing something, whether it be your phone wallpaper or Instagram settings, is changing something that is accommodating to you, the result of it being for you.

In relation to the topic Digital Media and Online Relationships, personalization comes to play within the social platforms that are used for the online experience of relationships between friends and family. An individual can ‘personalize’ their profile to include only what they want others to see to specific people they choose, apart from ‘customizing’ their profile with pictures and themes.