Last Assignment: Where to Put it

After finishing the third major assignment, a huge weight was lifted off of my shoulders. In addition, I was faced with a new issue. Where could I put this production so it could reach my intended primary audience of Millennials and my secondary audience of employers? With various social networking sites and blogging readily available, I have a lot of options. I chose to post my production on Facebook as well as Twitter, to share with my friends and followers who are mostly Millennials. As for getting to the employers, I decided to post it on YouTube so it can get to more of a general audience.

Both Facebook and Twitter as well as YouTube are considered Web 2.0 locales as Danah Boyd points out in her writing on Web 2.0 and how the spread of content and information is being altered due to Web 2.0 emergences. Web 2.0 has unique characteristics, including the interaction aspect and the concept of networking versus the broadcasting of information. Social media like Facebook and Twitter are prime examples of this.

The only real difference in the two types of websites is that Facebook and Twitter are more networking sites since only my friends and followers can see my posts. The majority of these people will see my posted video whether they like it or not.  YouTube on the other hand, makes videos viewable to everyone in the world who has access to the Internet. They only thing is that people have to consciously search for it.

As Henry Jenkins says in his “Why Participatory Culture is Not Web 2.0,” this concept known as Web 2.0 exists to “capture and harness the creative energies and collective intelligences of their users.” He describes Web 2.0 as a business model instead of a theory of pedagogy, or the study of the methods and practice of teaching.

Although I am mainly informing the audience about my exigency of what separates Millennials from other generations and why it may affect the future workplace atmosphere, there are no limits to the digital production I created. After posting it on Facebook and Twitter, I literally cannot control where it goes or who sees it from there. They may share it with friends via the “share” button on Facebook, or “re-tweet” it to their followers. By allowing and initiating this great spread of information, my audience will view it at the very least. They may go on to respond or create their own exigency as well. The options are essentially endless once it goes viral.

According to a post on Navarrow Wright, “TechCrunch recently reported that Facebook accounts for 38% of sharing information online." Facebook developer Isaac Sailer-Hellendag writes about the share option on his Facebook Developer blog.  As he states, this sharing option is “one of the most powerful and simple ways for users to share articles, pages, video or Flash content,” which ultimately opens up the way information is spread on the Internet. Hopefully the Millennials who view my production on Facebook will utilize this unique option, and share it with the rest of their Facebook friends so my audience can be broadened even more.

In a way, sharing this production via Twitter and Facebook is a way of “harnessing collective intelligence,” as Tim O'Reilly says in his article. This way, I can share what I’ve researched and learned about so others across the country and the world can learn from it and pass it on. I am, as O’Reilly says, adding to the “global brain.”

By selecting Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as my online Web 2.0 locales for my digital media production, I am advertising and sharing my creation with the online world, specifically my friends and followers, as well as anyone who consciously or unconsciously searches for it. Because most of my friends and followers are my primary target audience of Millennials, this seems appropriate. It’s harder to target my secondary target of employers, but by posting it on YouTube, hopefully I can overcome this barrier.