Tag Archives: Twitter

Fee Plumley.

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  • Fee is a super cool, couch surfing evangelist who will be travelling around on a road trip that aims to build a two way culture – oh, and she loves to Tweet. She describes herself as a geek artist, technoevangelist & nomadic digital consultant from the UK.
  • Driving around australia sharing culture – top down, art and culture should be shared with everyone and everyone is doing amazing things everywhere, not just in cultual hubs

…reallybigroadtrip is an experiment in living & breathing creative digital culture. The plan is to get a bus and drive it around Australia, making and sharing geek arts with everyone that I meet. It’s an artwork and research project, plus a home / studio / workshop / exhibition / screening and collaboration space, all wrapped up in one big bus.

 

I’m a big fan of collaboration, crowdsourcing my life & exploring digital culture by using digital culture.

 

With the assistance of my truly awesome geek possee, and your crowdsourced suggestions I will seek out opportunities to exchange artwork, stories, knowledge & networks.

This is a mobile digital arts space that will travel to you, wherever you are, and will take other makers along for the ride. My national & international ‘Nomads in Residence’ will tell me where they want to go, who they want to meet & what they want to achieve while they’re with me. I will help to facilitate those relationships & of course share everything that subsequently takes place.

  • Isn’t ‘event’ focused, more focused on the user experience and the moment of connection being maintained via participation.
  • There is a number of ways to make yourself visible and maintain those relationships as you go through.
  • Social media allows you to capture moments and share them with your friends, its a way of saying ‘im here, your not’.
  • Collective experiences need trust and bonding to maintain – create a platform for every single access point in journey to form the experience in it’s entirety – people can tag you and a media hub is created for you that gives flavour and texture to your project.
  • Examine the ‘cloud’ of activity in particular digital locations – see who’s active and where the most active spaces are.
  • How can we be concerntrating on the ‘art’ of projects/culture if we are always tweeting or instagramming? Tweetseats – backchannel to what is going on in the physical location that has potential to create dialouge, depth and richness in the information.
  • Augmented Reality – Via the internet and GPS your location is targeted and the internet knows the coordinates – so you can go somewhere without going there, as long as you know the coordinates. You can create rich, deep and immersive digital experience. Manifest.AR are big players in this trend.
  • Dont just use technologies as they come ‘out of the box’ consider how they make you feel and how you can use them as part of the storytelling arc and create texture and journey.
  • Role of transmedia 
  • Storify – create a trail and take videos of yourself as a kind of diary

ReadLand and Twitter.

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Using twitter to promote our participatory project has proved to be the least successful platform for acquiring contributions. We have found Twitter to be useful in ‘touching base’ with another audience, who can use quick informal links we post to access our Facebook page, which has been by far the most effective platform.

 

Early on in the semester I identified Twitter as a space for quick, immediate statements, it does not leave space for reflection or elaboration, often, the 140 characters you send out is lost in the plethora of tweets and forgotten the moment it is read. We have used Twitter to link people to Facebook so that they have time to read our callout, to respond to it, and hopefully to submit a contribution.

Posts such as the one above have been really helpful in anchoring the focus of our project, as it’s quite ambiguous in its defining terms, we are being purposefully open in what contributions should look like. Twitter allows us to make subtle suggestions and provide an avenue into the project with quick little bursts of inspiration via imagery.

Example contribution.

Twitter has also been extremely useful in connecting with likeminded networks, the ability to tag people (@) in posts, and directly tweet to them has proved to an invaluable tool and one that is quite unique to the Twitter platform.

Example of an interaction with radio documentary makers Paper Radio.

Twitter also allows us to thank contributors publicly and keep a good sense of momentum, other users may see a Tweet sent out from ReadLand thanking a specific contributor and click on our page, and then become inspired by the project. Alternatively, followers will be inspired by the contributions of others and feel compelled to contribute themselves.

RWAV 10th September Edition.

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radio radio

Our broadcast today went really well considering the circumstances we had to contend with! Unfortunately we were all really busy over the last few weeks and didn’t have a lot of time to commit to organising the show, but this time last week, Sarah, Bianca, Kit and myself decided to band together and get things happening.

We secured interviews with Matt McCullough from the incredible charity Bicycles for Humanity which is a world wide, grass roots, volunteer run organisation focused on simple, sustainable empowerment in the developing world. They send unused donated bikes from the developed world to our partner organisations in various countries in need which allows members of developing communities to travel far more efficiently. As well as providing cheap sustainable transport for whole regions these workshops provide skills training, employment and entrepreneurial opportunities for the communities in which they are placed.

We also interviewed Meredith Peace from the AEU about their campaign Keep the Promise, which saw thousands of teachers walk off the job last week and if ignored, threatens to put extra curricular activities in schools in jeopardy.

The broadcast went really well, I think the show was well balanced but highly informative and relevant to RRR listeners who are political and interested by issues of sustainability.

Playing the train doco added a nice, nostalgic texture and I think would have connected with audiences well.

Unfortunately we had a few (minor) technical stuff ups – we played the wrong song at one point and unfortunately that meant there was a lot of music in one part of the show and a lot of talking in the other – comments after the show were really positive though, nobody except us really seemed to notice!

Our wonderful wonderful producer Sarah got really sick and had to go to hospital right at the last minuet and nobody could fill her place, so it was a tough gig to get the timing perfect and it was hard without her chirpy little voice popping in and out telling us how we were progressing. It’s a luxury to have a fourth person, but definately a comfort! It was hard to keep track of everything with just Bianca, Kit and Myself as we all had other things to focus on as well as ‘overseeing’ the smoothness and timing of the show.

PHEW.

Oh, and we got retweeted by some of our artists and interviewees too!

We did manage to tweet through most of the show, but fell down a bit at the end when things started to get messy with the running sheet being rearranged due to last minuet changes.

Overall, a good show – as someone said in the kitchen after; “its not a good show unless you fuck up…at least twice”

Visit radio on demand to listen in if you didn’t get the chance.

Monday 10th September running sheet if you want to have a squizz!

Tumblin’ About.

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Here is a link to our Tumblr page for the upcoming IM2 assignment.

Here is the pitch Erin wrote after we brainstormed some initial ideas around the theme of Journey//

Traverse through generations and across geographical location.

We want to learn about your family. We want you to learn about your family.

Share your story.

Let us experience vicariously through your recount.

We are interested in the preservation of the past: we must ensure that what has happened is not forgotten. We want to:

Laugh, giggle, smile, weep, cry, sigh, be shocked into silence. We want our hearts to race in time with yours. Perhaps you may prompt us to remember too: faint flecked memories of times almost forgotten.

But not beyond recall: because if we stretch and prod, we can remember the rushing rapids and rocks and the men talking about their days in the army and the enveloping heat.

Let us remember together.

As you fell in love with the land: let us too. Do you love the dirt, the flora, the trees? Does the sunshine fill you with awe and a joy that makes laughter bubble within your throat? How do you feel when you think about your country?

How did you get here? Where do you come from? Why? With whom? Have you always been here: are your roots in Australia as deep as the most gnarled tree?

Tell us about your grandparents.

Or your sister.

Or your aunt or uncle or cousin. Or yourself.

Tell us about the romance with Australia. Pride?

This is a locational journey: this is relevant to the land and to you and to your family. We want personal true real stories. We want grit and mud and sunburn and salt. We want to feel the sand between your toes or the lashing of the wind against your so-creased face.

Using Tumblr both to record inspirations, thoughts and ideas has so far proved useful in clarifying and exploring the direction we want the project to take – I think by starting up a Twitter account will help in allowing the project to become more widespread once we have formed a more solid idea.

#gobackSBS

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Go Back to Where you Came From which is a three part documentary series that aired on SBS recently. I watched the series last year and found myself touched by the stories of refugees and the changes to the attitudes of the Australians who took part. As a viewer however, I was not shocked by the racist attitudes harboured by the participants, and felt like the views expressed were fairly expressive of the views held by the majority of Australians. I am aware of the issues surrounding the Australian Migration policy and have long been an advocate of the rights of refugees and a protester against detention centres. Of course, the minority was represented and of course, there is a lot of empathy and compassion for refugees in the hearts of some Australians. I think there was a lot of blame directed, quite offhandedly, at the media for creating the kind of loaded phrases such as ‘stop the boats’ or characterising refugees people as ‘threats to our security and jobs’. The program did a wonderful job of illuminating the underlying humanity of refugees and did well to identify and question the stigmas attached to regfugees as people. It chose to focus on the personal side of the debate rather than the political which I think was a good decision because it would have achieved a far greater reach and diverse audience. However, as a student of the media, I think a similar examination into the role of the media in the refugee debate is important, the media is seen as such a big part of the problem, yet nobody has actually gone in and made them accountable – perhaps people want to be able to blame the media, and to an extent see it as something they cannot avoid, therefore popular opinion is crafted on an assumption that we can’t change the news. I think we can – if we choose to watch programs such as Go back to where you came from and refuse to watch inflammatory programs such as ACA and Today Tonight, we of course open ourselves up to horrible truths, to difficult questions and to an uphill moral battle that could end in profound change. But these are discussions worth having, and shows Go Back to Where you Came From are worth watching – do it, it’s online!

This is the first series I have watched on television that I have followed live on Twitter – the concept has always seemed a bit weird and confusing to me, but as I watched and saw the tweets of like minded people flooding the #SBSgoback hashtag, I felt immediatley as though I was part of a community of people who were united in their viewing of the program, and was excited by the presence of others online who echoed my thoughts of the politicians and media figures on screen. I think Twitter is especially valuable in the success of shows/documentaries like this as it creates a kind of buzz that these issues need in order to reach the public. It also unites people together in a kind of coalition of the willing, and provides a space – however arbitrary or open to trolling it is. There are conversations happening that otherwise wouldn’t and hashtags are being linked, the issues are being weaved into other debates such as feminism which, on Twitter, carries the hashtag #destroyingthejoint (sparked by Imogen Bailey and Catherine Deveney’s comments/appearence on the show)  and people are increasingly given permission to speak.

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Home Workin’

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MAIN TASK – Service/Platform analysis – what key sites/applications/services should your online identity be on and why? what makes these spaces tick? what function do these spaces serve or could serve for your ID? Analyse the affordences of 2 services (list on blog) – run your bio media through them to see what they do (this will give you media to attach to your Pool profile – you will all report back to the class next week in an informal 5 min presentation

Twitter

Twitter is a immediate platform that gives users the chance to send out a 140 character ‘Tweet’ to followers – they also have the opportunity to tag others (@) and define posts via a Hashtag (#). Twitter is all about consistency, its a fast ever evolving consistently updating roll of short, sharp comments on a plethora of subjects. Honestly, it’s hard to keep up sometimes, but if any platform is capable of creating a clear sense of presence in the online world, this is it. Twitter doesn’t mess around, you have to be succinct and to the point. It’s a bit slutty, it’s quick and dirty and doesn’t promote long exchanges via comments or private messaging. Its highly public – everyone can see everything posted by anyone. This is a feature that many are critical of as it provides scope for offensive content to infiltrate the space and you can’t really block it out with all the retweeting and favouriting by all the people you follow.

Nevertheless, I think Twitter is an important part of a professional profile simply because it provides a space where professionals can be more informal and show audiences another side of their personalities. I think a good example lies in politicians who have increasingly been using Twitter to tweak their ‘image’ and appeal to the new market the Twitter community has created.

This ‘informal’ post gives K Rudd a chance to interact on a personal level with followers, and probably serves as an example of how ‘funny’ a politician can really get. As you can see, Twitter allows K Rudd to include elements of his personal life into his professional one va Twitter. This kind of stuff adds to his profile as a politcian, simply by having Twitter, K Rudd opens himself up to a new, expanding, switched on community.

I think another great affordance of Twitter is it’s ability to create a ‘map’ of a persons day, and a record of the things they have been doing that they would otherwise be unaware of.

For me, personally, I think Twitter could very easily enhance my online presence and help me form communities to a certain degree.

I used to think about using Twitter but it seemed so stupid and pointless – I didn’t think anyone would really care about my cat or what I had for lunch. I’m starting to realise now that Twitter doesn’t have to be like that, it’s actually important to post a variety of Tweets from early on because it’s a space that is buzzing with identity – you don’t want to ‘pigeon hole’ yourself or cut yourself off from certain communities. So that’s my goal, to use Twitter to actually convey who I am, post about things I see, that i’m interested in and that i’m thinking about instead of conforming to what I see as ‘typical Twitter’ behaviour. The fact that it links with Instagram and my iPhone makes the whole thing even better.

That said, Im off to Tweetland!

Profiles Unpacked.

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Examine the following profiles.What is the tone of voice; how much information is conveyed in the limited text; what interests you or not about this description; what does it suggest to you to include your own description? Search to see how these profiles are represented in other spaces such as LinkedIn; Facebook; etc.

 First off, the name instantly connotes a feminist persuasion which instantly grabs my attention probably on the pure basis that im a female. The brief bio is short punchy, and appeals to me because the writer doesn’t seem to take themselves too seriously despite the fact they are studying a PHD. I think this description does well to interest me because often I would roll my eyes at hardcore feminists, but the sense of fun combined with intelligence intrigues me and I want to kind of ‘be in’ on her rude jokes, maybe because they will mock men. haha. But really, this kind of description is good because the fun tone works to convey the mood of the Twitter feed but the description gives you the information needed to hook you in and let you know that the content isn’t going to be level one man bashing, it’s going to be about current issues relating to women, for women. After Googling ‘News with Nipples’ I discover Mia Freedman’s profile on Linkdin.

This gives me a lot more information than her Twitter account and provides a far more professional picture of Mia as a personality. Her Twitter is obviously a lot less formal and focuses on more ‘real’ issues, getting women to connect via shared lamentations on the calorie count of ice cream or crafty ways to buy clothing thats too big and claim they have lost weight. The News with Nipples Twitter account is a great way of attracting potential audiences by combining lighthearted banter with larger issues, and provides a really good facilitation tool into gaining the respect and confidence of ordinary women everywhere.

This profile got my attention because it said fuck – yep, sometimes an f-bomb is all it takes for me to click on something. However, the combination of the f-bomb and I’m a pigeon is what probably sealed the the deal. It’s clearly going to be funny, entertaining and totally out of left field. Is this guy actually convinced he’s a pigeon? I think so. Creating an online identity is one thing when it’s surreptitiously done to lure people into a false friendship, but when it’s overtly ironically, it can be super engaging and actually quite effective in pointing out things about society in a fresh and roundabout way that can reach audiences it would otherwise not. However, Jon’s profile turns out to be, in fact, a series of short and punchy tweets about being a pigeon in London. He clearly aims to be elusive – check out this interview on Shortlist. Im not sure how much profiles like Jon’s can assist me in a professional sense other than proving that sometimes creating an alias can liberate you to say what you like, but really, in terms of a professional profile, this doesn’t do a lot for him personally (whoever he is), because really, he’s just a pigeon.

Integrated Media Two – The Beginning.

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So, we have to paint a picture of how we use social media and I guess this screenshot of my browser kind of elucidates the kind of user I am – pretty stock standard Gen Y’er.

I primarily use Facebook to organise my life, to connect with friends and more recently to form networks. I think after coming to uni was when I started using Facebook for purposes beyond simply to communicate with friends. Uni has opened me up to using groups to do assignments and keeping in touch with what is going on both at uni and with assignments. Facebook is sure way of being able to connect with your group quickly and efficiently and also keeps everyone ‘in the loop’ so to speak.

As im very interested in art and photography, I ‘lurk’ on a lot of photo sharing sites such as weheartit and Tumblr, but rarely actually post any content, I often archive it for my own personal use or ‘reblog’ it. In this sense, I guess I do not actually contribute a whole lot to the envrionment, except for perhaps on Vimeo where I upload quite a lot of ‘professional’ content such as uni work and projects.

I really enjoy using this blog as a way of kind of mapping my progress throughout the semester and the community it creates of students each contributing their own ideas and reflections within singular spaces that connect.

So in terms of myself as a social media user, im pretty passive, HOWEVER, I just created a Twitter account AND an ABCPOOL account.

ABC Pool is a social media site where you can share and engage with creative work and collaborate with the people who make it. It’s a place to upload images, text, audio, and video. Anyone, any age, anywhere can contribute to Pool.

Pool is run by the Australian public broadcaster and has a number of projects to which you can contribute independently or co-create with others. It’s a place to meet collaborators, and Creative Commons licensing provides a way to share your work in a safe legal framework.

 

This sounds super interesting and cool so should have a look at some of the projects that are happening!

Occupying Twitter…

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I found this article to extremely relevant to the ideas we have been exploring in Networked Media this semester.

This article is based on the truism that social media has to the inherent ability to connect people and their ideas. This idea, that ideas can be instantly spread via social networking has led to it’s use as a political tool which has resulted in Facebook and Twitter becoming platforms for social movements, protests, collective action and even recently, revolutions.

Hashtags on Twitter have become an incredibly powerful tool in the proliferation of ideas targeted to a specific group. Ideas can literally be ‘spread’ by these hashtags which users can follow and receive second by second updates on the particular topic or event.

The recent Occupy Wall Street protests have been cited as potentially misplacing

Our trust of, and romance with, social media has been shaken by the #occupy protests…it’s almost as though social media might have cheated on us. But we can’t prove it – we can only dig for evidence

Hashtags are a user created phenomena a system for ad hoc organisation. They help groups assemble, and can be easily modified: #occupyeverywhere, #occupyfacebook, #occupySF, even #occupyramsaystreet have popped up.

Many Twitter users were outraged that #occupywallstreet, the official, and by far the most frequently used hashtag of the movement, never showed in the official Twitter ‘trending’ list  (an aggregation of the most popular hash tags used on Twitter).

See the blog where these accusations and trend graphs are posted – it’s really interesting to see that the blog has taken the accusations outside of Twitter because it’s no longer ‘trusted’ as a platform which is free from government intervention and manipulation.

To really understand what happened, we need to look at the new rules of critical mass media:

1) Users provide Twitter, Facebook and Google with data: what we are thinking, saying, and doing: what we’ve done; what we plan to do; what we’re thinking about doing. Then, through a complex process, they tell “us” what they think we’re doing. It’s a conversation but in the end Twitter, Facebook, and Google still have the final word.

2) Twitter, as with other online social media, both disperses and attracts audience attention. It is collective yet ephemeral, fluctuating as people tune in and log out.

Regardless of what people think, we don’t know which Twitter topics will trend, why some do not, and how this is really determined. Just like Google’s search, it a complex, protected formula. The fact is, as Twitter’s spokespeople stated themselves, algorithms and full access to user’s activity data are not public. Nor do they want it to be. Twitter is a business that must protect its intellectual property.

Perhaps it’s time to leave Twitter and Facebook behind as vehicles for these kinds of movements, and accept them as mere platforms on which to launch ideas which we should take control in playing out through specifically crafted social networking sites. Social Media is transparent, and without its own politics and hierarchies.

This is exactly what Occupy Wall Street has done by launching a free Android app as well as Vibe, an anonymous, open version of Twitter.

For more info on the Occupy Wall Street Protests click here, or if you want to support New York this Saturday, come along to the protest at City Square.

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