Post #10: Final Post
Video link:Â https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn12meFUoig
This class made me more aware of social media and forms of writing on the internet. I am not very active on social media so I think this class was really eye opening to writing in other forms besides essays. While writing Wikipedia, photoshop, blogs, and Youtube I had think about the message I wanted to send to my entire audience compared to essay writing. In essay writing, I write about a topic and it is (usually) only read by a professor so it has to be written professionally to educate, argue or prove a point with references. On the other hand, when I am writing for media, I am concerned with evoking emotion or informing my audience in a simple way since my media is available for the public to access. When writing for the Wikipedia project, I had to make difficult to read research into something simpler for the audience to understand. For the floral telegram project, I chose colors that evoked emotion. Sets of red, pinks, purples, oranges were chosen to represent the passion of the piece. When writing my tumblr blog, it taught me how to be more comfortable writing in first person while answering my prompts. This is the first class that I have written in first person and although it felt awkward at first (because I was taught not to write in first person), I learned how to write my thoughts and opinions better. These different forms of media writing relate to essay writing by making me think about proving and arguing to a broader range of people than my professor.Â
The video writing process was more difficult than Wikipedia, photoshop, and blog writing. While writing for these forms of media, after finding a topic or message, I would have to choose a topic/research and put together a piece of media. Writing for video I had to be more creative thinking about a topic, what kind of scenes I wanted to take, and how I would educate my audience. For my video, I was confused at first what I wanted to do a video on but eventually I decided to do it on Che Thai, a dessert that I enjoy making for my friends and family. By doing a video on this dessert, I can educate on a dessert food from my culture without it being âjustâ a cooking video. Editing the clips took quite some time because I wanted to do a still frame and I had to cut a lot of them so they were not too long. Also, I had to find a balance between the length of text scenes and how long the video was. I could have made the video shorter by shortening all the draining and cutting scenes into a couple scenes but I was not sure about minimum time and was worried it might have seem too easy. I chose a theme to my video because I feel like cooking videos usually have a theme so that people will come back and subscribe to their channel for more videos and views. For the tags, I just used some that were related to the video such as che, Vietnamese, dessert, Thai, cooking, food and so on. My friend posted the video to her school page and I shared it to my family members and friends. At most, I think I will reach 500 views from these groups of people. It is interesting to see that when I search âChe Thaiâ, my video is on the front page (but lower on the list) of the Che Thai videos. This video writing project was different than essay writing because I had to think more creatively about a topic instead of being limited to a topic. Also, I thought more about the clarity of my voice, and how easy and clear my instructions are unlike essay writing.Â
Viral literacy has taught me more about how useful media writing is and thinking more about evoking emotion. It has not made me want to gain more digital approval but it taught me many things about how social media has become very dominant in our generations and how to effectively use it to promote products or videos. I probably will not try to create something viral again unless I need to for a marketing or PR job. By improving the chances for something to go viral, perhaps I can market a product I am trying to sell better and make it go viral. However, I do not see myself doing a job similar to do this because I do not think I am not very good at selling information to people. If I ever encounter a viral situation, I will probably avoid popularity by not responding to offers or posting a post (since I will have followers if I was viral) saying that I will not respond to media attention. I will be very inactive on social media if I was gaining viral attention.Â
Overall, I enjoyed this class and it was fun discussing about social media effects and virality on different types of media.Â















