Reflecting On Serial Nashville
I’ve loved the TV show, Nashville, ever since it started, especially because I’m such a big fan of country music. I decided for my serial project for the semester to create a Storify that recapped and reflected on each week’s episode for Nashville’s second season. My plan was to string these Storify’s together on a Tumblr blog, and hope to gain just a few followers. I posted about two weeks of Storify’s when I realized that my original plan wasn’t going to cut it. I had exactly 1 follower - I needed to re-evaluate. So, I decided to make a Twitter account for the new Nashville-fandom part of me. I called this Twitter account SerialNashville, and made the account pictures photos of Scarlett and Rayna from the show. Immediately I picked up some followers. I remember being excited when I hit 20 followers - all people i didn’t know, just other fans of the show! I was even more excited when they started liking and re-tweeting my posts. By the end of the semester, I had a total of 73 followers (I promise none of which were friend or family I had bribed to help me out)! This was more than I had ever expected and I was very pleased. I noticed that throughout the semester my Storify’s started getting a little longer. I was becoming more invested in them with more followers on my Twitter account and I wanted to make them better! I also noticed that the tweets and comments from other people that I pieced together to make my stories were starting to affect the way I felt about the show. When the majority of tweets I read rooted for Scarlett, I started root for her too and stopped thinking she was annoying. When the fans were enraged with Teddy and sympathetic toward Deacon, I was as well. This project drew me in to Nashville even more - it drew me into the Nashville fandom family. If I could go back and start this project again, one thing I would change would be to be more interactive with the other fans. I didn’t like or re-tweet my followers' tweets very often, but I’m sure if I had I would’ve picked up even more followers. There’s a limit to the success you can have with something like a Twitter account when you aren’t involved in it on almost a day-to-day basis. Overall however, this project was a success to me, and I’m counting down the days (2!) until season two of Nashville starts back up again!
