‘Signed Off’ Final Presentation

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Abstract

Social medias are websites or in the recent years’ applications that allow users to create, share, and participate in online social networks. Users invest time and money into building their presence online, and continuously pour efforts into perfecting that presence and drawing attention to it. Jobs have arisen due to the demand of strategies on how to the best encourage participation and attract attention in online social media sites for companies and their products. With social media now being such an important part of life with human growth, interaction, development, and relationships all at its feet; the question arises of how does it affect us arises?

‘Signed off’, is a final project experiment which I subjugated myself to undergo. The task of the experimental project embarked on the basis in which I, Mariah Rajah, would completely and purposefully disconnect myself from all social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Tumblr, and Twitter. This experiment hopes to track through daily blog posts, captured video, and photos how the disconnect affects my attention and participation structures, as well as provoke or bring into the light underlying psychological disturbances caused to either emotion or affect during the two-week experiment.

With the support of research material, I hope to prove how social networking sites are a large contributor to the decline in generation Z’s cognitive ability to process, find, and pay to longer forms of  information whether video content or text, to disregard the need to take part in face-to-face contact and interactions, to lack social skills, to display signs of attachment and addiction, to lack the ability to deal with problems without the need for mediation communicative applications, as well as to crave or demand the need for instant gratification in all aspects of life. ‘Signed Off’ hopes to shine light on the ways social media has removed human behaviors from humans and led them to only being to best functioning individuals in online spaces.

‘Signed Off’ PowerPoint Presentation

Final Project Presentation

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ABSTRACT 

Twitter is a multi-modal and fluid platform that allows users to generate and consume content at a rapid pace. Producing relavent content on a fast moving site such as twitter can prove to be a challenge. In researching and determining strategies that are suggest to be beneficial in producing content with high engagement, a trial testing a variation of these approaches was formulated. Though there are several different approaches one could take four mainstays appeared throughout. Several sources that offer tips and strategies to build engagement are, Forbes, Business Insider and the NY Times. Though their approaches vary they share several commonalities. By utilizing hashtags, cross posting content and sharing exisisting content the Twitter analytics project showcases how the strategies at hand played out when applied. Over a period of four weeks four strategies were combined and applied to a personal twitter account to gage the validity of each one. Combined in a short period of time the experiment was moderately successful, resulting in a slight increase in following and a notable increase in engagement views per tweet.Through the trial and error of applying these strategies it stands to reason that not all of these suggested approaches work or are viable to apply to smaller more personalized accounts. Therefor it is crucial to note that not all of the content that is popular on social media follows or adheres to the tear of strategies most often proposed. While conducting this engagement experiment several factors came into play, such as, time constraints, frequency of posts, currency of the information being transmitted. In summary of this experiment several key things can be noted. The timeline to building a solid user engagement is lengthy an cannot be determined over weeks or even months it more realistically takes a year or more, strategies are geared toward businesses or entrepenures and that without proper promotion user content is lost fairly quickly after being posted. This experiment is relevant in determining the approach a future social media composer or student may take when seeking out a path to increasing their own social media presence or engagement.

Download (PPTX, 5.38MB)

Class Notes 12/10/15

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  • Final Draft Presentations  due 12/15 by 2 pm
  • Final Draft Write up (25%) due 12/21 by 12 pm
  • Reflections (10%) due Mon 12/21 by 12 pm
  • Final course reflection due 12/17
  • Final Presentations (10%) : due Tu 12/15, 2pm 
    • post to our course site (categorize as “Final Project Presentations”)
    • in-class presentations on Tu 12/15 & Tu 12/17 (Those who are presenting on Thursday should not change their presentation after Tuesday)
    • If there is more you want to say in the presentation beyond the time limit, it may be mentioned afterward in the Q & A section.
    • Presentations should start with explaining what it is now and then the process.
    • Test if you are giving keynotes beforehand to make sure it works.
  • Final Course Reflection: due Th 12/17, start of class (must be done in a constructive and critical way. Extra credit will be given for those who complete the assignment according to the guidelines)
    • email file to Professor Belli before class
    • bring printed copy to class
  • Final Projects, final (graded) drafts: due M 12/21, 12pm
    • Create post on our Course Site (categorize as “Final Projects”) that includes an abstract of your project (~350 words), a link to the project write-up (& multimodal deliverables) on your ePortfolio site, a PDF of your write-up, the file (or link) to your presentation, and the file of your Project Reflection.

 

 

 

Revised Abstract

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Abstract

Over the past few decades, new media technologies such as smartphones, tablets and other devices have changed storytelling and the ways stories were once delivered. Due to the shift in new media, there are new ways stories are shared through social media sites such as Facebook (an online social networking), Twitter (an online social networking service that enables users to send and read short 140-character messages called “tweets”), Instagram (is an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that enables its users to take pictures and videos, and share them on a variety of social networking platforms) and blogs (a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete entries (“posts”) typically displayed in reverse chronological order). A popular site that uses storytelling and visual rhetoric through various social media platform is Humans of New York, a photo blog by Brandon Stanton. The photoblog introduces viewers to various stories that explore issues such a sexism, freedom and loss just to name a few and in doing so has vastly changed storytelling. The photo blog shares unique stories via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and their site which affords viewers and user of those online communities a chance to connect and engage. Often times many of these stories receive over 1,000,000 views and are broadcasted on local news station. In an effort to understand how the stories mediated through Humans of New York become successful and afford users a chance to engage, I will analyze how the stories become successful and assess their best practices. By determining their best practices, I will use their best practices to produce three images on the subject matter loss and populate these images via my personal pages on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and personal blog Black Attire Aficionado and monitor user engagements with the subject. The quantification of user engagement will entail monitoring the sites and record and analyze the different ways users interacted with the image. Essentially, by using their best practices, I believe I can produce user engagement to Humans of New York but on a smaller magnitude. Finally, by understanding user engagement on different social media sites, one can tailor the message for a specific audience which can contribute to a more successful story delivery. 

 

 

 

Extension for Final Project Write-Up & Reflections

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I’m happy to see the project drafts coming along nicely. In order to allow more time for everyone to work through further drafts/revisions of their final projects, I’ve extended the deadline for the Write-Ups & Reflections to M 12/21, 12pm (Presentations are still due by 2pm on Tu 12/15, and will occur in class on Tu 12/15 & Th 12/17, as planned). The Schedule has been updated to reflect this extension.

Good luck with revisions, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions as you work on the project.

Tomorrow (Th 12/10): In-Class Run-Through of Draft Final Presentations

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Just a friendly reminder that drafts of final presentations are happening in class tomorrow, and that these are drafts of your final project presentations (happening next week, in class), not “progress” presentations. Therefore, they should reflect the entire project (not just your progress this past week). I encourage you to review the Presentation component guidelines/expectations. If you would like to revise your presentation, you may do so until the start of class tomorrow (Th 12/10): just create a new post with it on our OpenLab site (categorize as “Project Presentations, Round 1”), if you revise.

You’ll receive peer review, discussion, and instructor feedback in class tomorrow on these presentations, to help you revise for the final draft of them next week.

Revised Final Project (draft)

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Abstract

Online spaces or social media platforms centers around the presentation of self and impression management that users of the web want to portray in their online presence. Self-presentation refers to conveying oneself with the help of information or visuals that other people can view about a particular individual. In order to practice the effectiveness of self-presentation, I’ve decided to join the social platform of LinkedIn to produce an e-magazine for my peers to use as a guide so they too, can successfully present themselves online. Because I am a college student and college students alike are constantly making strides to obtain opportunities in their field of study, I believe LinkedIn is a great job-seeking tool used to present oneself professionally in hopes of getting employment. LinkedIn is not your average social media platform; it may look like Facebook but the content shared on the site is far more relevant and significant to landing that dream job. Students are constantly struggling to find employment and LinkedIn is a great way to start as long as they present themselves in a professional manner. Those who opt out of the LinkedIn route may find satisfaction in their e-portfolio where they can professionally present themselves by showcasing their academic work throughout their college career. With self-presentation comes strategies needed to be professional for both the real world and an online presence. Through utilizing my LinkedIn account a social platform to get ahead in the professional world, I have found there are specific attributes that are linked to not only a professional profile page but the fortune to make connections with the right people and gain opportunities that was once out of reach. With my e-magazine, students are invited inside to take a closer look at what it means to present themselves appropriately in a professional realm.

Revised Abstract – SEO

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The challenge of having a great website is bringing people to it. Why is this important? Whether the website is a business or just for recreation quite often no traffic means no sales. At the very least, no visibility. Having a high-ranking can be critical to the success of a business as it makes it easier for website to be found. The fact is, if a search engine cannot find a site or add a site’s content to the database, there is potentially a missed opportunity. But in order to get people to visit websites that are unknown to them, search engines rely on queries. These are words entered into a search field and produces a list of sites that are ranked on their relevance. A list of results that help the user find exactly what they are looking for is then generated. Yet there are no guarantees that a website will come out on top in a search or even have the traffic that can help to make this possible. So then what is the best way for getting traffic to a websites? While there is no conclusive answer to this question, by understanding and using search engine optimization (SEO), it is possible to achieve a higher ranking on search engine return pages (SERPs).

This project identifies SEO techniques used to optimize websites and evaluate the potential advantages. This project also analyzes two websites for style and word content and uses comparison tools to compare the performance. The findings in this project conclude that optimizing a website can increase visibility and help boost rankings.

 

 

 

Class Notes Tuesday, December 8th

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Project Write Up/Portfolio

Key components include:

  • Synthesize all the work which is very different from compiling. Synthesize means to put together; make something out of all your different aspect/components. Compiling means to take all the parts you’ve done and putting them all in the same space (container) and therefore, they all belong together, forcing your readers to figure out what it all means.
  • Integration– putting things in meaningful conversation with each other ( narrative)
  • Framing happens in the intro, conclusion and abstract.
  • contextualization
  • “so what?” (significance): What is this project? Why does it matter? What did you find out?
  • narrative
  • product
  • revision/changes
  • document: stand alone
  • audience (what they need & in what order?)
  • research/ sources
  • affordances of platform (e-portfolio)
  • abstract
  • multimodal
  • organization

*The write up is not a research paper. It is a write up of YOUR project. From here on out, this is a revision process. Think of the write up as a portfolio. The goal is the multimedia text in the e-portfolio. 

Lay out your project according to what you did without saying, “in my first week I did this….”

Ask yourselves:

What is the purpose of your project?

Who is your audience?

What context should your readers be able to understand in your write up?

Your multimodal components of the project should be housed in your e-portfolio and should be mentioned in your write up. They should be a part of the text because they are a component of your project. YOU MUST HAVE LINKS in the text.

Seek a balance of both your sources and what you’ve done in the process of your project into the write up.

Sub pages in your e-portfolio is encouraged rather than thrown on one page with long lengths of texts.

More of the progress and process should be in the reflection, you should not regurgitate what is in your progress blogs into your reflection.

Next steps…

Presentations starting the beginning of class on Thursday, December 10th

As you talk around your presentation, make sure you hit up the key points. This is not a presentation of what you’ve done to date.