Reflection

This project was the first time I had ever used the internet in such a way. Overall it was an extremely interesting and provoking assignment. I could have never imagined how difficult it is to transform or create a space in the internet and be able to occupy it in such a way that it creates a virtual community of its own. The hardest part by far was getting and audience besides our own group members, receiving zero likes on our posts definitely lead to discouragement in our attempts of participating culture. It was also very interesting to look at the internet in such a creative, positive, and encouraging manner. From our different attempts of exploring the Apparatus Theory, through forms of Literacy, Orality, but mainly attempting to execute Electracy.

Before this project and class I had never thought about the communication of Electracy and honestly had minimal experience using it in the virtual space. Creating this page on Tumblr and attempting to reach and connect with an audience made me realize that the only way to be able to get through to the people, as a group, and actually be able to harness the power of the internet is by creating an occupied space that sustains a thriving community. This is where I believe my group lacked in some ways, we did not proved the proper means to sustain an audience or community. Though we would attempt to change this by posting polls, questions, memes, and much more articles and posts that encouraged for an audience to engage and participate those results were not seen.

Looking back on it I believe that Tumblr might have been a more difficult platform to use (though I did think that its platform template and website design displays more forms of Electracy and creativity then others) simply because the amount of users on Tumblr is significantly less and so our audience is greatly more limited and restricted then what we may have wanted for this particular project. Also the fact that we mainly posted links and shares made us seem more as simply the middle man passing information along, though we did have instances of remixing images and creating our emblem which we thought the best way to get attention and reach our audience was through humor remixing an image and creating a meme from it. However the actual result of a thriving community wasn’t there and all our posts seemed to be me as a virtual settlement rather than community.