Project #2- Reflection

Reflection:

For this project, I learned a lot about social media but also about real world situations and the consequences that go along with that. Our topic is a very serious one, not only throughout Boulder but in society in general. It really forced me to look at the big picture and actually analyze why we created this group and how it could actually provide some relief in the homeless population. I think our group also learned how to gain participatory action from our friends and people around us. We learned this from spreading the word through multi-media applications and getting people to really involve themselves in the situation. This could be from saying hi to a homeless person on the hill or from just reading about the homeless population in Boulder and get educated about the subject. I also think working with a group as opposed to working individually helps to spread the word better. This is because we are providing multiple forms of social media on one platform and including different points of view which can relate to our audience in various ways. We were consultants for this group and even though we weren’t experts on the topic of homelessness in Boulder, we still provided people with analysis, data, and guidelines for our viewers to comment on and spread with other people. We not only wanted people to be engaged but we wanted people to have some sort of participation and I do think we accomplished that. For example, my friend Chloe texted me the other day saying that she saw our group on the Facebook newsfeed and thought it was such a great foundation we were raising awareness for and that she wanted to participate. She told me that she read a lot of the articles we posted and shared them with the people she worked with because she liked them so much. This made this project much more real to me because it showed me that creating pages like this actually can make a difference and relate to people on a different level than I would of thought. I never thought creating this page online would actually get us viewers, but it did and that really shows how engagement, attention, clicktivism, participation all those terms we know really does register with people and myself as well. I made sure that my posts pertained to our group and it was something that I would want to read myself which I think connected with our viewers as well.