Reflection

This project helped me to understand how different forms of social media can help important issues gain recognition through the dromosphere. I think this type of discourse (internet) has its major benefits like relaying messages and opinions to others, spreading the word quickly, and provides both visual and factual information. However, there are major drawbacks to organizing a project in this way. There is the idea of clicktivism which is hard because you want your audience to not just scroll through your posts that you took so much time to come up with and put effort into but you can’t control your audience. That’s why you have to have a variety of different forms of media in order to have that reasoneon effect.

I do think that creating an emblem and recognizing that emblem and problem as a sacrifice does help to represent the issue. Through these components, I think our audience realizes that this is a true problem that needs to be resolved and it is a personal issue to a lot of people. A lot of society believes that everyone is just going along for the ride and not really researching anything or giving background information, but through this project one could see how much time and effort I put in and how this is not only a worldly issue but it is a personal issue that I deal with on a daily basis.

Even though a lot of people deal with this personally, we do need to have that participatory culture which exemplifies that collective view on the issue of racism. If we don’t have a collective perspective/action,  we will never get to progress at all because one person cannot solve this problem by one “little” blog.

Even though I haven’t seen any results from this experiment, I do think that if I kept up this blog and actually tried to gain an audience, it would definitely help to sway people in the right direction and gain civic engagement and participation. I think this project is a great way of starting off small and then progressing to something bigger which could definitely impact our society. I could never just jump into something without doing my research, gaining an audience that believes that this issue is a sacrifice/MEmorial, or providing personal experiences as well.

I also think that the Popcycle is a major component of this project. Our society is based off of different types of entertainment no matter what the issue is. So in order to gain views and opinions of others, we not only need to provide factual information but we need to take information from other media, such as movies, music, etc. For example, I presented my audience with the movie FruitVale Station, which not only relays the historical shooting that happened in 2009 but it provides this information in a way that is entertaining and appealing to the public eye.

There are advantages and limitations to everything someone does or participates in. I think its the way the site is organized and the way messages are relayed makes it different than other sites. This project really made me aware of all the components you need to have in order to gain an audience and make a difference, no matter how big or small it is.