11 MARCH 2017

 

 

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A CAMPAIGN FOR CHANGE:

MAKING THE DIGITAL A REALITY

 

The campaign this piece discusses was a joint effort between myself and my peer Katy.

College can be a strange time for students, especially if the transition from high school is difficult. Though students may feel alone in their struggles, Katy and I have found that many of them are actually facing similar problems. We hope to address these by creating a Twitter account aimed at solving some of these common problems. @AcingCollege101 will regularly post helpful advice, tips, facts, and more in the hopes of benefiting college students through knowledge. For example, if we find a particular app that makes keeping track of homework or managing time easier, we will share that app through the account. We will also post tips with links to the articles to back them up, such as ways to get more sleep, ways to budget, ways to deal with homesickness, etc. These are just some of the struggles that college students may feel, and we hope to benefit these students by letting them know that 1) they are not alone and 2) there may be actions they can take to minimize their difficulties. Besides our tweets, we will use the hashtag #college101 and include it in all the tweets we can. Followers and non-followers alike can also make use of this hashtag and therefore join in the conversation, perhaps even sharing advice for what helps them in their own college experience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Above are images of the Twitter account, including the use of the hashtag #college101.

The choice to create an online campaign rather than a physical, “real life” one comes from the fact that our audience is largely what author Benedict Anderson would call an “imagined community”. That is, members of the collection of all college students in the United States have most likely not met everyone in the group. College students know plenty of other college students, but no one student knows all of them. So while “college students in America” could be classified as a community of people, it is largely an imagined one as opposed to a small, physical community where most members know all other members. Imagined communities are becoming more common with each new social media site, especially Twitter, where users may not personally know many of the users they follow, yet they may still feel a connection with them. It is this connection that @AcingCollege101 will seek to establish. We hope to reach various members of the “college student community” and spark conversation between community members themselves. As Marshall McLuhan famously states in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, “the media is the message” (ch. 1). In Katy’s and my case, this means that the ability to speak to the entire community of American college students via the internet in itself may create community. It would be difficult to have the time and funds to tour colleges in person to spread our tips for students, but by creating an online presence, we can virtually tour these colleges and perhaps even reach more students by doing so. Besides this, Twitter itself is particularly geared towards conversation and spreading information quickly. By using this media, we hope to create positive trends in the real world, and spread our message in a way that actually affects change in students’ lives.

McLuhan also claimed that “the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs” (p.1). The internet as a medium, and its various social media sites as well, has introduced a spread of information unlike anything seen before. Where it once took months for a message to reach the other side of the world, it now takes seconds; and where books once filled library shelves, endless texts are now available at the click of a button. @AcingCollege101 will use this to our benefit. We want to help students and we want to help them now. Using the internet’s natural abilities, we hope to help struggling students as soon as possible with useful and accurate information.

Twitter is a unique social media platform in that it lends itself to conversation more than other platforms might. For example, the ability to use a hashtag on Twitter allows for tweets to reach beyond one’s own followers. Besides this, they allow these other Twitter users to take part in a conversation that extends beyond just one or a few Twitter accounts. As we read in “#BlackLivesMatter: Epistemic Positioning, Challenges, and Possibilities” (Langford and Speight), the Black Lives Matter movement has made use of this, with millions of people joining in on the conversation with hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter, #HandsUpDontShoot, #Ferguson, and more. Katy’s and my campaign will capitalize on this characteristic of Twitter, using the hashtag #college101 in our tweets, and encouraging other users to join on the hashtag as well. This way, our tweets can reach a broader base, including users who may not even follow us or each other but will still be able to see useful tweets by clicking on the hashtag.

Besides the use of hashtags, Twitter provides users with the Retweet button. This allows users to “Retweet” tweets they wish to share to their own followers. Again, this allows one user's message to reach other users who may not follow them. When a Tweet gains enough “Retweets” and attention, or goes viral, it is hard for anyone to ignore. When this happens, “old media” like newspapers and television may even pick up on the trend, allowing the message to reach people who might not be online at all. We hope to use the “Retweet” ability often, both by retweeting tweets that fit into our message, and (hopefully) by having other users retweet our tweets so that they reach even more users.

Another affordance of Twitter is its 140 character limit. This limit forces users to keep their Tweets short and to the point, appealing to the shorter attention spans people are tending to have nowadays (TIME). People reading articles may lose interest if they are too long and not get the full message, whereas reading a full tweet takes almost no time at all. We will use this character limit to keep our tweets brief and relevant, making it easy for users to read one or multiple of them without losing interest. Twitter also allows users to add pictures, videos, or links in their tweets. This way, if users are interested by a particular tweet, they may have the ability to follow up or learn more about it through a secondary medium. @AcingCollege101 would take advantage of this ability, sharing links to the various articles, apps, and websites we find useful. If we tweet facts, we will also share the links to articles to back those facts up.

Research shows that Twitter use among millennials tends to be in the upper 30% range, 39% according to the Harvard Public Opinion Project. However, according to this same survey, use among college students in particular jumps up to 49%. And while this same poll shows a whopping 88% of students on Facebook, and 58% on Instagram, Katy and I feel that these platforms are not as suitable for our topic (Harvard). A study conducted by the American Press Institute (Media Insight Project) has shown that of the millennial users of Facebook and Twitter, people far preferred Facebook to see what their friends are talking about. However, they prefer Twitter to see what people in general are talking about. Since @AcingCollege101 is an anonymously run account, it may feel more fitting to be run on Twitter than Facebook, where we can chime in with current trends instead of being an anonymous page on a timeline of posts by close friends. Instagram wouldn’t work well for us either, as it requires a picture for every post. If @AcingCollege101 were to post a picture, it would be as an addition to an already informative tweet. Instagram posts thrive when the picture itself is the message, and the caption just adds to it, not the other way around.
 

I think Twitter is more and more demonstrating its ability to foster change. Besides our class case-study of the Black Lives Matter Movement’s online presence, I will return to my favorite example. Would Donald Trump have won the election without having a Twitter account? We don’t know. Twitter gave him a way to reach his audience directly, with no moderation from a third source like an author or news anchor, which allowed his followers more access to his direct words and thoughts. I would argue that things done online are often not taken seriously, and are often viewed to have little effect on the “real world”. Clearly this is no longer the case, as Trump’s twitter supporters were translated into “real” votes and ultimately a “real” inauguration. Still, every site eventually comes to an end. Twitter will have its day, but where old sites die, new ones appear. Perhaps we can transfer over our account to a new format when the time is right, making use of the best medium at the time. Where social media was once a place for teens who “do nothing but stare at the computer all day”, it has now become a serious place for people and movements alike to express, and therefore develop, themselves and their missions. This can have “real life” results, and in the case of @AcingCollege101, we hope it does.

 

Works Cited
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined communities. London: n.p., 1982. Print.
"How Millennials use and control social media." American Press Institute. N.p., 16 March 2015. Web. 10 Mar. 2017. <https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/millennials-social-media>.

Langford, Catherine L., and Montené Speight. "#BlackLivesMatter: Epistemic Positioning, Challenges, and Possibilities." Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric 5.3/4 (2015): 78-89. Print.

McLuhan, Marshall. "The Medium is the Message." Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. N.p.: n.p., 1964. N. pag. Print.

McSpadden, Kevin. "Science: You Now Have a Shorter Attention Span Than a Goldfish." Time. Time, 14 May 2015. Web. 8 Mar. 2017. <http://time.com/3858309/attention-spans-goldfish/>.

"The Institute of Politics at Harvard University." How Millennials Use Social Media | The Institute of Politics at Harvard University. April 2015. Web. 10 Mar. 2017. <http://iop.harvard.edu/iop-now/how-millennials-use-social-media>.