Unit 3 Reflection
James Carver
Cole Charney
Jessica Cohn
Krista Stephens
The mediums we chose to portray our Unit 3 Project were through Instagram and Youtube. After forming our group, we brainstormed ideas for which medium would be most effective in reaching the greatest number of people in our intended audience in an influential, easily receptive and informative manner. We knew that we had to choose a medium in the digital realm, and as a result, we explored various options and social media platforms due to our target audience. As a group, we discussed the topics we studied in the previous units and tried to combine pieces of each to form our Unit 3 collaborative project. In doing this, we found that many of us chose to focus on millennials and people of Generation Z as our intended audience. We decided these specific demographic groups would be the most effective and influential target audiences for this project due to the fact that we can easily relate to these generations and understand the mediums that best interest them. Since many of us learn well from visuals, Instagram and Youtube felt like the natural choice. Therefore we chose to reach our audience through a video with a voice over posted to Youtube supported by our interactive Instagram page.
The purpose of creating a video with voice overs was to add analysis to the content we researched and the original content we captured. Due to the fact that our argument focused on the negative impacts of technology on communication, we thought that both documenting real life examples of these impacts along with statistics would be the most productive way to explain our argument. We also felt including that information would urge our audience to respond to our call to action. Our hope, by showing our generation the pictures and videos we took first hand over the past two weeks, is that they will begin to recognize these patterns in their own life, and hopefully work towards limiting them. One of the most important aspects of our Unit 3 Project was our call to action. With strong statistics and our convincing argument, we knew that millennials and Generation Z’ers would change. We portrayed our evolving thesis in 4 specific points. Our generation receives messages best when they are straight to the point. Therefore, we broke down our video into 4 topics with extreme clarity for the viewer. By doing this, we realized that we could directly place specific examples highlighting what was said in the text to further our argument.
The particular argumentative topic we chose to investigate was the relation between technology and communication among millennials and those of Generation Z. As Generation Z’ers ourselves, as discussed above, we felt the most effective platform to reach and start a conversation with our peers was through Instagram. In the past few years Instagram has taken over the social media industry becoming the second most used social media platform behind Facebook. Over the past few weeks we have been posting original photos, videos and informative online content to our Instagram page which is followed by our friends, fellow peers, and millennials. Our purpose was to ignite a discussion between them, in search of their opinions on the relationship between technology and communication among our demographic. To warm our audience up to our topic, we began by posting informative statistics about technology and communication to ensure our followers had knowledge on the topic, which yielded a two way conversation immediately through positive reactions shown by the comments and likes. After, we posted numerous photos to the account that were less informative and more conversation driven. When creating the final video we incorporated a lot of the content from our page, specifically the comments we received from our followers. Overall, the Instagram page served as introductory material for our argumentative topic to get our audience educated on the issue and thinking about technology and communication.
With each photo or video posted we ended the caption with a rhetorical question to gauge the attention of our followers and prompt them to participate in the conversation we created.
As shown above, many of our followers engaged in the conversation by commenting their thoughts on how technology affects communication. A debate formed as avid commenter, Zach Gunther, disagreed with the opinions of other followers and voiced his concerns. After igniting interest and passionate opinions on the topic through the Instagram page, the final video we created and posted contained a call to action with ten actions millennials can take to improve communication and mitigate the drawbacks associated with technology and communication.
Additionally, from going around campus and capturing real time examples of these negative impacts we became extremely passionate about the issue, and realized we needed to make changes to our own lives. Overall, the objective of our Unit 3 project was to inspire our audience, to realize and make the changes we made in our lives to find a happy medium between technology and communication.
A comment that was left on our group member Jamie Carver’s Unit 2 portfolio was, “I like the way you used a positive and negative correlation between technology and life. I also like that you go into the aspects of psychology about how tech can affect you mentally.” This comment affected his writing in multiple ways. After receiving the comment, it reaffirmed the effectiveness that his writing strategy had by including psychological impacts when writing papers that analyze the positive and negative effects of a given topic. When people read about psychological impacts, it helps them understand and internally feel the writing even more because they can directly relate themselves to the writing, and can fully understand the topic that is being discussed. Another way this comment influenced his writing was by emphasizing the importance of always presenting thoroughly both sides of an argument within an argumentative piece. For example, within our Unit 3 project, we argued that social media has a negative impact on society and individuals, however, we did not leave it at that. We put forth 10 mechanisms/techniques about how to make social media and texting properly find its place within society.
A specific direct quote from the script of our unit three portfolio that displayed how the quote left on Jamie’s blog influenced our writing was, “Think of someone who you admire. Is that person someone who sat on the couch and was on social media connecting with friends?” This direct quote from our script is a perfect example of how through our writing we attempt to connect with the audience and help them better understand and connect with our writing and topics being covered. After receiving various comments on his blog, it really showed him the importance of peer editing and how constructive comments from one's peers can heavily influence your writing style in a positive way. Comments that are left on your work cause you to take an introspective approach to your writing strategy. That introspective approach helped him fully understand why you are writing the way you are writing, and why or why isn’t your writing strategy effective at communicating your message. Additionally, after the comment was left on his blog, it caused him to reevaluate his writing strategy, it also made him re-look over his blog to ensure that it was communicating the proper message to his audience through visuals. After evaluation, Jamie along with the other members of our group changed the makeup and layout of our blogs to make it much more user-friendly and sleek and help the audience find information much more easily.
Another quote left on our group member, Cole Charney’s blog about his Unit 2 portfolio read as follows, “your analysis for this paper helped you to produce practical and effective results for your reader, taking the negatives of phone/use of technology and providing simple solutions to these current problems. This in combination with your energetic writing style, develops a piece that directly engages your target audience.” This comment directly affected how we produced this project because one of our main goals was to provide examples and solutions that were easy to understand, interesting to read, and feasible to employ. From this, we came to the conclusion that statistics, voice overs, and real time photos/videos would facilitate the completion of such goal. A direct quote from the script that highlights how this comment influenced our writing was “Go to the store. Build it, don’t order it. There will be minimal rewards or gratification if you never have to work for anything. The struggle and the challenge is really beautiful. These barriers and challenges can yield amazing products, ideas, cures and overall happiness.”
Another quote left on our group member, Cole Charney’s blog about his Unit 2 portfolio read as follows, “your analysis for this paper helped you to produce practical and effective results for your reader, taking the negatives of phone/use of technology and providing simple solutions to these current problems. This in combination with your energetic writing style, develops a piece that directly engages your target audience.” This comment directly affected how we produced this project because one of our main goals was to provide examples and solutions that were easy to understand, interesting to read, and feasible to employ. From this, we came to the conclusion that statistics, voice overs, and real time photos/videos would facilitate the completion of such goal. A direct quote from the script that highlights how this comment influenced our writing was “Go to the store. Build it, don’t order it. There will be minimal rewards or gratification if you never have to work for anything. The struggle and the challenge is really beautiful. These barriers and challenges can yield amazing products, ideas, cures and overall happiness.”
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