Activism and Agency - Why did I choose it?

Mission 2: Culture

For our second mission in Introduction to Digital Media we had to research and present on one of the following: Memes, Blogging, Activism and Agency, Personal Data Tracking, Internet of Things, Augmented Reality, Online Hate and Harassment: The Trouble with Trolling, Youtubing, Digital Privacy, Selfies, Working for the Web or Wikipedia. In our Lab, Shaun got us to write down some points on each individual topic on why we would or wouldn't want to work on that particular one. The two topics that I personally was most interested in was either Online Hate and Harassment or Activism and Agency. By myself I wrote down why I thought I would like to do one of these topics. I use social media a lot and see Online Hate and Harassment on a daily basis, singers, actors etc. get a lot of hate in their comments so I thought it would be a good one to look in to. When I looked into Activism and Agency I knew it was the one I wanted to go for, activism is such a broad subject and the second I googled it there was so many options for me to look at regarding the topic.
The social media website I use the most is Twitter and it's one of the main reasons I chose this topic, everyday you see a hashtag trending that has something to do with activism so I thought it would be interesting to look into them a bit more and learn about some that I may not have known much about before.

When I chose which topic to go for I was then put into a group with fellow classmates who were also interested in Activism and Agency. I was paired with Karolina and Robert.

After being paired with Karolina and Robert we looked through the mission brief to see what the goals and suggested tasks were and between ourselves decided what work needed to be done to complete this mission.

 Some of the goals for this mission included the following:
- Learn about hashtag activism - I wanted to see where it all began, what was the first social media trend that went viral.
- Practice archiving and annotating social media content - Use websites like Tags and NodeXL to archive twitter content.

We looked into the suggested tasks of this mission and between ourselves talked about what we would do to complete it.

My next blog post will be about how we produced our work for this mission
Seán