Tumblr Post #10
1. So, this is going to be my final post for Writing 105m…it’s always an interesting feeling reaching the end of a school quarter, much less a school year, almost a sense of despondence over what’s coming in the future. For me the nostalgia may not be as strong as it is for a graduating senior but as someone entering his fourth year it’s odd to think this will be my last college summer. Regardless, talking about the class I enjoyed all the different mediums that we worked with. Doing the Wikipedia editing was probably the most fun I had during the course. Being able to leave something on the internet that will always be there and others will look at is an interesting feeling. Videos on YouTube would also fit in that category but this was the first instance that I had worked with Wikipedia and I had never realized the kind of process that went into Wikipedia editing. In my opinion being able to edit well on Wikipedia is a good indication of ability to write. Despite the flack Wikipedia may get for its editing system it is clear there’s a system in place that checks a lot of the edits, looks for verification, there’s ongoing discussion about applicable edits, and other things. I’d say that it gives a valuable lesson to anyone doing a research paper because many of the same steps are included when researching a Wikipedia article to edit, and the kinds of edits that you want to add to it.
I think that this course through its various projects forced me to be more creative in ways that I’m not accustomed to. I’m an Econ/Statistical Science major so I deal with math…all the time. This is the first quarter in over a year that I haven’t taken only Econ and Stats classes and it was a breath of fresh air. I haven’t really had many opportunities to express myself in classes simply because everything in the classes I take is about formulaic application of concepts, there isn’t much room to be creative.
2. For the video remediation project I worked in a group with Jimmy Mann and Dylan Robbins-Kelley. Our video was called “I Hate UCSB Backpack Alerts, AND SO SHOULD YOU!” The idea for the text source we wanted to work with was an email from the UCSB alert system about an abandoned backpack near the Psychology building. From there we decided to make the video about the daily activities a UCSB student might be doing that would be interrupted by those frequent UCSB alert texts. The brainstorming for the ideas took maybe an hour and went relatively smoothly. Filming only took a day and was made significantly easier by the fact that Dylan and I live in a house with six other people. There was no shortage of willing participants for our film. Because they were our friends it made the filming process enjoyable and it passed a lot faster than you would think. From our original brainstormed ideas we filmed maybe 80% of our total ideas. In editing we would shorten down the clips we would use from the ones that we filmed. For the editing I have to give most of the credit to Jimmy. In terms of editing he was the person that made it all work, Dylan and I may have contributed ideas as to how the film should look but Jimmy was the one with the technical prowess to make the vision a reality.
Once the film was finished the next goal was uploading it and spreading it as far as we could. We didn’t go into the video planning to make it viral or aiming to gather a lot of views. If we had we likely wouldn’t have picked our current topic. While the UCSB backpack alert may have been easy to remediate into a video format it covered too narrow a range of people. The only people who would really understand would be UCSB students. Regardless we posted it on YouTube and first shared it on Facebook. Here is where we started our viral marketing campaign, in the initial post of the video we tagged everyone in the video, there were quite a few actors to tag, tagged people who provided props (no matter how insignificant the prop was), we even tagged the person who threw a frisbee from off-screen. The idea was that the more people tagged in the video the more people will see it on Facebook, not just that but when you see your friend participated in a video it increases the chances that you give it a look. This probably generated 150 views in the first day. The second step of our viral marketing campaign was posting it on Reddit, on the subreddit r/videos. We didn’t post it whenever though, we reasoned that Reddit gets the most traffic at 5AM PST, because people on the East Coast would wake up at 8 AM and when better to check Reddit than when having morning coffee. The relatively early post time would decrease the competition that our post would receive. By 12AM the views had more than doubled with the view count posting 301+, an indication that YouTube was still trying to process the views. This was by far our biggest success.
When we started we each took our own guess as to how many views our video would receive by the Sunday deadline. Even at our most optimistic we were only expecting 200 views, with 100 being a more realistic expectation. The video as of Saturday June 6 resides at 720 views, a far cry from our predictions. Honestly, I’m still baffled we reached that many views just from the promotion that we did. I believe most of the traffic came from Reddit users who browse the new section of r/videos when they first arrive at work. At those hours people likely watch all the videos just to seek for entertainment and that got us the views we have.
3. The unit on viral literacy definitely changed my views about going viral. I still believe it’s incredibly hard to go viral and that it’s more likely you fall into it than successfully create something viral. I do think though that the power of social media is incredible just from the traction that our video had. I don’t think our video had the widespread appeal or easy to grab aspect that most viral videos have. If the content was worthy of viral I believe it would have gone viral. Prior to and after the project I still feel as if I wouldn’t want to make something viral. To me going viral just seems like a “15 minutes of fame” kind of scenario and I don’t really desire anything of that sort. I don’t think it would help in my future career simply because I doubt that the thing I go viral for will have any relation to what I wish to do, statistics. It seems to me that educational viral is much harder to do unless you have a strong infrastructure and a really good teacher with a wide range of topics, i.e. Khan Academy or Tech Talk, which is the only situation in which it would help my career. I don’t really plan on taking any steps to change the amount of attention I receive but I do understand now that there is a point to liking things, as in giving something a share or like, an option I had usually disregarded because of how pointless I found it.
Because this is my last post I feel obliged to leave a few comments about the class. I really enjoyed my quarter in the class and I wish everyone a good future. This applies not only to the graduating seniors but our professor who’s leaving UCSB. Change is always a hard thing to deal with, but all we can do as humans is embrace it and move on to the new, bigger, and better things that hopefully await us. Good luck to us all.
















