As I said in my previous blog post, the main reason I wanted to focus on this topic for the mission is because of how often I see activism on social media. For a while, during the beginning of the #MeToo movement it felt like every time you logged into your social media account a new celebrity had been accused of sexual assault or harassment. With social media growing activism has become even bigger online with new hashtags trending every day. I wanted to look into the big hashtags that I've seen to get a bit of background on them and see how and why they began.
The first thing that we done as a group was made it clear what we each had to do and how we would do it. We decided that we would each look up about the history of citizen journalism and learn about how it was different before social media became big and then compare it to how it is today. The next thing that we would do was to look up current hashtags that are successful, important or controversial. The last thing we would do would be to archive a hashtag and see how it develops.
To research the history of citizen journalism I researched and read some articles from Google about it, one of them was better than the others and it actually gave a timeline that included images on citizen journalism that dated back from before social media to now.
As you know there's so many hashtag these days, people use them for pretty much anything - when they're watching a tv show, talking about politics, football matches etc.. so I wanted to look into ones that I had seemed to always see trending on Twitter. The ones I identified were #ClimateStrike, #Trump, #Remain and #PresidentP***yAssBitch. You can kind of guess what each one would mean just by reading it (maybe not the last one).
The next thing that I did was looked into a certain hashtag in detail, the one that I chose was #MeToo. I looked at where it all started and how it became what it is today, I read loads of article including victims statements and the response from Hollywood actors who had worked with Harvey Weinstein. At first I wasn't sure which hashtag to actually look into but after looking through my options which included #MeToo (obviously), #repeal, and #togetherforyes. I decided in the end to go for #MeToo because it's one that I think will always be developing, women and men will always have a story to tell regarding sexual assault and more and more people will come forward. #repeal and #togetherforyes were both successful campaigns but aren't really used as much since both referendums have been and gone.
To finish the mission we had to archive a current hashtag, I had a bit of trouble with this part as one of the suggested programmes "NodeXL" wouldn't actually download on mine or Karolinas laptop. When it wouldn't work I decided to use "Tags" insead, Tags is a Google spreadsheet that basically lets you archive tweets straight from Twitter to the spreadsheet, I had it set to update every half hour so I got loads of content from it. Looking through them there was a reoccuring tweet that involved the singer John Legend re-releasing the song "Baby it's cold outside" in which he changed the lyrics for the #MeToo era.
When we had all finished our work in the mission we put all of it together on Powerpoint and presented it to our Lab class. Like the previous mission, I thought design layout was really important so was sure to make it look as neat as possible.
My next blog post will be about reflecting on the mission. It will include what I thought went well, what didn't and what I learned.
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