Final Project Proposal
For our final project we are creating a video that will contain a series of interviews, a presentation of our research to help remediate the claims of the academic articles we find, and an accompanying survey that asks students about their use of social networking websites and how theses sites affect their interactions with their peers, connect them to career opportunities, and exposure to online advertising. Our ultimate goal is to find out how social networking sites affect student’s lives. We will search for academic research on the evolution of online communities and their influence on our culture, careers, and social interactions of students. To summarize our findings we will incorporate a written piece at the end of our project that will elaborate on our connections to the reading and analyze our findings. When interviewing people we hope to find a balanced representation of all social media sites. This includes the obvious major social sites (Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and Youtube) and smaller career, hobby, and blog sites (Linkedin, last.fm, deviantart. Tumbler, blogspot, wordpress., reddit, 4chan, and digg).
There are many sources of academic literature already written on the recently increasing online social networking trend. We intend to consult texts including “How to find a job on Linkedin, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and other social networks,” “Online social networking on campus: understanding what matters in student culture,” “Making connections: readings in relational communications,” and “Handbook of research on socio-technical design and social networking systems,” which are all available at the University’s library. Reading these texts prior to beginning our interviewing will help us form a thesis about how we believe social networking has played a role in altering the way people interact with different groups now and in the future. We can then gather our own information and see if it coincides with the current research. As part of our field research, we will create a facebook page, to represent one form of social medium, and attempt to see how many users we can connect with in a certain amount of time. This will help demonstrate the interconnectedness of a social networking site like facebook and the amount of exposure a page can get just by being apart of an online community.
Though we are not yet certain what our thesis about social networking will be until we have read scholarly articles and books related to the subject, we have some ideas about what we will do once we have crafted a thesis. After we have considered the arguments of multiple academic texts, we will remediate these arguments in various ways. The main way we plan to do this will be through film. This film will certainly include footage of interviews relevant to the topic, which will likely be the focus and majority of the film. This is because we believe that seeing firsthand how social media affects real students is the most productive way to illustrate our ideas on the topic. Our film will also likely include other forms on media other than normal alphabetic text, such as music, photos, or graphical representations. Another idea we are considering, if it relates to our thesis, is making a facebook page ourselves in order to document first hand what social media and networking sites are like, and include this in our film.
Before reading academic texts, we some preliminary ideas about how social media affects students’ lives. For example, we could examine the way social media enhances certain kinds of social interaction while hindering other kinds, or that it is changing social interactions altogether. We can also examine how social media sites influence consumers through marketing and advertising, and how politicians sway potential voters through various methods on these sites.
Digital media today is a unique form of advertising strategy. With the every growing social network, more and more online users connect themselves through various website hubs. These sites are all-unique and share a different experiences for users. For example, Four Square is a location/geo-tagging based social network. When using the site users “check-in” to share their location with friends. When checking in various deals (based on proximity) are shared with the user. The experience is different for every single account holder. This seems to be similar with other social networking sites. Every single site offers a variety of features to help you connect and share data with other people. The Internet was invented to help connect a network of computers to share data. Social networking sites do the exact same thing, and connect people around the world. Social networking uses the Internet as it is intended to be used. It’s time for people to realize that this social networking thing is not a fad, but it’s here to stay and prosper over the years.
With this project I believe our group can gain a stronger understanding for social networking. With this knowledge we can gain a stronger understanding for current advertising and public relations strategies. The use of a video/facebook page can help improve our experience and used our skills that we have developed throughout this course. We believe that creating a video will best share our research because we can use audio, video, images, etc… The ability to share videos these days through social networking can also help us spread our word to a large group of people easily.
