REFLECTION - SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION
So far Intergrative Practice has been filled with miss steps and missed deadlines and a number of large setbacks due to the fact I had been ill from the beginning of this project. This was quite disappointing for me as the original interrogation and the six degrees of separation seemed incredibly interesting and I really wished I would have been able to actually action my ideas and see if my message could get to James Charlton whilst he was in Berlin.
One thing I did realise is from reading everyones blogs was that almost everyone seemed to immediately gravitate to conventional techniques of connecting with people; email, Facebook, physical letters. We were encouraged to try different things and not worry about failure; but instead think about our process and what it accomplished.
Right after reading the assignment I had a few ideas to accomplish the task. Some were the traditional message to a friend or a letter like the documentary we were encouraged to watch. Others where ideas like starting a viral video campaign like KONY2012 and it was this idea that I felt the most strongly would be an interesting way to connect with James.
The plan was to follow in the footsteps of the KONY2012 campaign and create a viral video which if became highly popularised would be seen by him somewhere whether by word of mouth or due to him actually seeing it on a blog or website he followed. Hashtags and social media popularisation would spread a further web to try and pass the message of my interrogation on to him
But it was this first excerpt from the KONY2012 Wikipedia page that really made me think that this was a great way to reach James.
“Kony 2012 is a short film produced by Invisible Children…It was released on March 5, 2012. The film's purpose was to promote the charity's "Stop Kony" movement to make African cult and militia leader, indicted war criminal and the International Criminal Court fugitive Joseph Kony globally known in order to have him arrested by the end of 2012″
I wanted the film to strike a chord with people from all walks of life to make them become heightened the purported ideas and share it in order to spread the message. I wanted people to think about how they could find James and somehow get him to see it. If I could have made it become personal for people I believed it could actually work.
I certainly learnt a great deal about the idea of six degrees of separation. The skills and lessons I learned from thinking about creative ways to contact people and spread an idea or message will be a lesson I don't plan on forgetting. This theory has also shown me how small the world is and the goals I have and opportunities Id love to be given could be a mere 6 people away; I just need to figure out who I should talk to first.