Experiment 3

Proposal

"For my third experiment, I plan on continuing to focus my project more on a theme of identity and what people use to define their own. In this experiment, I will be interviewing people about things that they do in their life that they claim as part of their identity. I plan on interviewing both people in shooting sports and people in other sports or activities. Depending on the interviews, I might be able to draw connections on how things we think are important in our lives have a huge impact on who we are today regardless of what sport or activity we do. I originally planned on this experiment taking form of a journal or picture diary, however, after discussing with my work groups and peers, I decided to go down a familiar but new route. I am going to make a social media page on Instagram with each post dedicated to one person with their interview in the caption."

Sketch

"I want the look of my Instagram page to be very simple but interesting. I plan on using colorful images of people doing what they talk about as part of their identity or using a related image if the person would like to remain anonymous. Pictured below is a black and white 'sketch' of my sketch."

Reflection

Genre Analysis

"I went in thinking that social media posts would be easy. I have social media, so it wouldn’t be much different than my own posts and experiences, right? I was wrong.

On a social media platform such as Instagram, the caption or space for writing is limited. Luckily, Instagram seems to have the most space for a longer caption; coming in at around three hundred words per post. When searching Instagram pages, I noticed that people tend to edit the post to become well under three hundred words. This could be due to the reader losing interest or not seeing the whole post until it is clicked on. The social media accounts of photo essays such as Humans of New York also tend to have similar lengths of captions in their posts. This gives a nice aesthetic if the reader clicks on the whole profile and reads a bunch of posts in one sitting. The rhythm and tempo of each post flows extremely well while keeping the integrity of what each person said in the post. Humans of New York also use quotation marks to show the dialogue as if the person featured in the post is speaking to the reader themselves. This creates a more personal connection between the post and the reader. For my experiment, I would like to use direct quotations of the people I interview in an attempt to achieve the same connections that Humans of New York has on the readers."

Sample

"After doing all three experiments, I don’t think I’m surprised to be surprised of the many twists and turns each part of the experiments took. In this experiment, I started out drawing many different ideas from what I learned and explored earlier to spark something new. Before officially starting this experiment, I thought I was going to make a journal with photos and an entry every day. As I worked through unscrambling my thoughts, I landed on the Instagram social media page which turned out to be more involved than I originally thought. Surprisingly, after the many different shifts of mediums and genres I was planning on choosing for this experiment, parts of the page that I thought would be easy were a lot harder to make than what I thought.

I don’t know if it’s the perfectionist in me/ my extreme pickiness but coming up with a name and bio for the Instagram page took far more time than estimated. I knew that word choice and pacing are very important characteristics of a social media page. I did not know that it would take an enormous amount of time trying to come up with something clever yet simple to catch and keep the reader’s attention.

Despite having a rough time with 'small' parts of my experiment, I am happy with what this taught me about different avenues in social media platforms and their use. Regardless of if I use this experiment as my final project, I learned enough to feel confident on making my own project on a social media platform aside from my personal profile."

This way to the Final Project!