DML #3: Out of This World Kindness
Being on a college campus, we noticed something about our community. We noticed that our community doesn’t connect with each other as much as we would like them to. This is especially true for the Auraria campus because it is not a normal campus where everyone lives in traditional student housing. After classes, everyone leaves and goes home which makes it hard for people to feel connected throughout college. Whether it be because of how busy they are or just because they don’t know how to start, everyone seems to ignore each other for the most part. We decided that spreading positivity would be a great way to bring people together, which is why we chose to use positive messages for the project. Being that we were getting close to finals on campus we thought that everyone could use a bit of positivity in these hard times, so we went about setting up our project to bring that positivity to the students of the Auraria campus.
It took a few iterations for us to get to the final project. We first were going to put origami stars all throughout with positive messages inside so that it would be like a scavenger hunt. People would then hopefully spread the word online about these and they would become popular with more people looking for them. We ran into a few problems with this plan. First, it didn’t seem feasible to make enough stars to make an impact. We thought to make it a collaborative effort by having people that found a star make one of their own. We soon discarded that idea when we asked around on campus and found out that not many people would be willing to do that,. We then thought about doing star shape sticky notes, so it wouldn’t be much work for our audience to make their own. This also came with problems because sticky notes start looking pretty bad after a short time and it would have been hard to put a lot of them around so people could make their own. In the end we settled for making a flyer that linked to a snapchat so that it would be easy for people to see the messages we made and we wouldn’t have to make a ton of them to spread everywhere. This would be able to make an impact on a greater audience while not having to make a ton of the flyers. We still wanted to incorporate the stars though, so we made a few small ones with tags that had positive messages on one side and the hashtag #spreadthestars on the other side and hung them with the flyers.
Our flyers were then posted at the Colorado Convention Center light rail station, the Auraria Library bathroom, a North building hallway, the 3rd floor of the Tivoli, the STAT organization office, the Science building, as well as the Colfax at Auraria light rail station. This provided a well balanced scope of the common public areas available to all Auraria Campus students. We used the snapchat and the hashtag primarily in order to reach more people, however we also made it accessible on Instagram and Twitter. Social media was used, then, to keep track of how many people participated in our project through how many people followed the snapchat and how many people used the hashtag. In terms of overall engagement, we’ve acquired 23 friends on Snapchat, 24 followers on Instagram, 8 followers on Twitter and reached a total high of 20 views on a single post. Through this, we hoped to spread positivity through the campus and maybe help others connect in a meaningful way.
In order to make our project a DML effort, we posted flyers that would bring positivity and teach them how to participate in the community through social media. The community participation might be minor, but we still thought it was important for college students to understand. Sharing via different social media platforms allowed people to have their own part in our project, making it a participatory culture where the producers and consumers were one in the same. As the producers, we added ‘dummy posts’ so that the accounts were active and we could show people how to participate, hoping that they would post using the hashtag. Also, throughout the project we address a civic issue that our community is having; the fact that people were not connected and that there wasn’t enough positivity being spread. Finally, by using social media we made it so that it could be shared beyond our community and hopefully can bring in outsiders to learn about spreading positivity and being connected to each other. The DML aspect comes into play when we used the social media on top of our in-person flyers so that there were multiple ways for students to get involved and make an impact on their own lives and the lives of people around them. As we’ve seen throughout our learning in this course, social media is the key factor that gives the user agency to bridge the gap being creator and consumer.
We hoped to connect people through positivity and maybe make finals a bit easier in the process. Through the physical and digital work, we tried to teach people how to spread positivity and how to connect with their community. College students were able to do their own part to make the project work and get the positivity to spread. It wasn’t without its problems, but we managed to make a solid idea and a great way to execute it. The project is now done, and we decided that because of the deadlines we had to meet and the project being one where a long time is needed in order to truly spread positivity, the project was not 100% successful. With more time, we will try to keep up with the positive messages and continue to bring more people into the affinity group we have started on campus. Although the project was not a roaring success, our group feels that we were able to do our part in starting something that could become a really big movement and could impact the lives of a lot of people.