Why?

With this project, I wanted to do something a little different. Thankfully, the open-ended format to both this class and this assignment gave me the freedom to do so. I didn't want to be unoriginal with my creativity, if that makes sense. As we were going around the class sharing ideas, it seemed that everybody was finding a safe, common ground: create a blog with a few different pages, slice up the analysis and throw it under different tabs. I wanted to do something a little out-of-the-box, something that reflected my book a little more uniquely.

"Computers, Phones, and the Internet: Domesticating Information Technology" discusses the effects of information and communication technologies on daily tasks, individuals, and society as a whole. So I thought to myself: how would information and communication technologies affect my project? I was intrigued, so I ran with it. I created Twitter and Instagram accounts and began sharing my thoughts on the book's concepts bit by bit.

As I said in my first Tweet, this entire project was unscripted. At no point did I sit down and write out an outline of things I wanted to talk about. I thought that doing so would detract from the main purpose of using the social media format. I wanted to see how an open, casual format would affect the outcome of my project. I didn't want to simply chop up a prewritten essay into 140-character pieces.

Having said that, the process of creating my final project was undoubtedly changed by the format I chose. Writing was a lot more casual. I was never stressed about having to sit down and punch out another 500 words. I'd simply open the Twitter app on my phone and scroll through my feed of the latest tweets. The constant connectedness and ever-updating aspects of Twitter allowed me to draw from other sources and opinions. If I found something that I thought related to my book, I retweeted or commented on it. Much like in the case of blogging for class assignments, I found that I felt a lot less pressured to write everything perfectly. Of course, I tried writing as professionally as I could, but the casual format of Twitter allowed me to focus more on content, not on sentence structure. Just as my book suggests, I definitely found a lot of comfort in doing my project on Twitter versus typing it up on Microsoft Word.

I quickly realized that the horrific elementary school shooting in Connecticut was a perfect case study for how how social media affected news, people, and society. So for the majority of the project, I looked for connections between the information and opinions being published on social media sites and the arguments in my book. After following the aftermath for about a week, I can confidently say that the arguments posed by the authors of "Computers, Phones, and the Internet: Domesticating Information Technology" hold true. Information and communication technologies do change how we take in information, how we process it, and how we decide to react both as individuals and as a society.