Social media is
a large part of many Americans' everyday lives. Rather than always focusing on
news from sources such as the newspaper or news channels on the television like
they may have used to do, our society has switched to a more inter-personal
news source. Facebook has become a household name; though not everybody is on
Facebook, we all know what it is. It’s a continuous stream of thoughts, ideas,
opinions, feelings, news, photos, videos, and useless information that you may
never have needed to know (like somebody’s plans for the day, or what they had
to eat for lunch). But among all of this information, we often can find
relatable bits and that is what keeps us coming back. According to InternetWorld Stats there
were 184.2 million Facebook users in North America as of September, 2012. Many
of these users come from the United States, which is the audience I am trying
to reach with my production.
Facebook is definitely a part of Web 2.0. It is interactive, communicative, ever changing, networked, and includes a multiplicity of identities (a few of the traits of Web 2.0 that we talked about in class and many covered by O’Reilly in What Is Web 2.0). The user is the one who controls their experience, giving Facebook its interactive characteristic and with this control, they are able to be communicative in a sense of distributing and receiving information from others. With this passing of information, Facebook is ever changing and has a constant flow of new information, which also deals with the economy of attention. In technology today, it is important that one’s attention is not focused on a certain thing for too long, else interest will be lost. The aspect of being networked comes from the millions of users online, each having their own online identity connecting them to others.
For my digital media production, I created a map of the United States which had a photo of each state’s top attraction (according to the blog post Most Popular US Attractions: State By State) instead of “empty states” like a normal map, through Photoshop. The info graphic that I created is a fitting response to the rhetorical situation that in the United States there are many people who are perfectly comfortable staying inside their home, not leaving their hometown. Our country has so much to offer and this is a way for them to realize that. This production grabs attention and encourages those people to “Get Out and Explore!”
This is why I chose Facebook as the online place to share my digital media production. Facebook users have a flow of information coming at them. Boyd explains in her article Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media that “It's also about restructuring the ways in which information flows in modern society.” That’s exactly what Facebook does, it creates a flow of information that is given directly to the user and that’s what makes it such a perfect online space for my production. Users will be forced to see this info graphic; soaking up every bit of information they see as they scroll past it on their news feed. Those who enjoy it will be able to share it with their friends, encouraging a wider audience for this production which was it’s first intentional goal – to be seen by as many people as possible, gaining interest in a variety of people.
Here is my distributed digital media production:
Facebook is definitely a part of Web 2.0. It is interactive, communicative, ever changing, networked, and includes a multiplicity of identities (a few of the traits of Web 2.0 that we talked about in class and many covered by O’Reilly in What Is Web 2.0). The user is the one who controls their experience, giving Facebook its interactive characteristic and with this control, they are able to be communicative in a sense of distributing and receiving information from others. With this passing of information, Facebook is ever changing and has a constant flow of new information, which also deals with the economy of attention. In technology today, it is important that one’s attention is not focused on a certain thing for too long, else interest will be lost. The aspect of being networked comes from the millions of users online, each having their own online identity connecting them to others.
For my digital media production, I created a map of the United States which had a photo of each state’s top attraction (according to the blog post Most Popular US Attractions: State By State) instead of “empty states” like a normal map, through Photoshop. The info graphic that I created is a fitting response to the rhetorical situation that in the United States there are many people who are perfectly comfortable staying inside their home, not leaving their hometown. Our country has so much to offer and this is a way for them to realize that. This production grabs attention and encourages those people to “Get Out and Explore!”
This is why I chose Facebook as the online place to share my digital media production. Facebook users have a flow of information coming at them. Boyd explains in her article Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media that “It's also about restructuring the ways in which information flows in modern society.” That’s exactly what Facebook does, it creates a flow of information that is given directly to the user and that’s what makes it such a perfect online space for my production. Users will be forced to see this info graphic; soaking up every bit of information they see as they scroll past it on their news feed. Those who enjoy it will be able to share it with their friends, encouraging a wider audience for this production which was it’s first intentional goal – to be seen by as many people as possible, gaining interest in a variety of people.
Here is my distributed digital media production:
