Over the past few weeks, we worked on specific aspects of the Equality of Opportunity Project. My group wanted to explore top tier public and private school endowments to see if there is a correlation between the annual money they receive and the success of their students. Personally, I am a little lost when it comes to Tableau, but Shiven did a great job visualizing our data in graphs that were easy to read and analyze.

As seen in this figure, it was hard to establish a clear trend between endowments and economic mobility. This was not surprising to us because it is not only the amount of money that factors into mobility, but it is also the allocation of it. We saw that UCLA and UC Berkeley were high in mobility rate but were one of the lowest endowments of top tier schools. I wanted to look into this but allocation of endowments are kept under wraps so it’s hard to access that information. If the Equality of Opportunity project could somehow access that data, I think it could really contribute to their mission and help us better understand the financial aspect of a school’s success.

This project has a lot of potential but it was worked on for a very short amount of time in our class. With the amount of data EOP provides, it would take at least a full semester of working on it to start to establish some real trends. Also, the economic mobility of students after college has so many underlying factors (sex, race, gender, socioeconomic status, geography, resources, etc.) that it is hard to study one aspect when it clearly involves all of them. There is no way to involve all of them at once but then again it is hard to address one at a time. It reveals a true conundrum when trying to discern what kind of school will make a student most successful.

In our podcast episode, we focused on Imgur. Brian is a frequent visitor on this site but it was the first time I had used it. It revealed itself to be a lot different than the blogs I have been on. Rather than posting written text accompanied with media, its main focus is on media itself. It is a collaboration of images posted by millions of users. In this way, it really utilizes an active audience, instilling participatory culture as a cornerstone of its website. With that, there are some drawbacks. Its purely democratic nature highlights certain images over the others because a group of users sift through the pile of new images and “upvote” the ones that they like. This leaves the other images lost amidst the thousands of images that are constantly being uploaded. It’s ranking of users reminded me of Black Mirror. One of its episodes was about a community revolved around up-voting and down-voting people based on their actions and dispositions. Their rating determined their rank in the social hierarchy. It is eerily similar to the environment established within Imgur and we discuss this more in our podcast.

As I stated in my last podcast reflection, our HONY podcast was rich in content but our delivery was not effective or engaging. We stuck to a script and that was transparent when listening to it. After completing that podcast, I wanted to improve the flow of our discussion in our next new media topic. Rather, I wanted it to be more of an actual discussion, not us describing why it was a good example of new media.  I decided to go about it in a new way in this podcast, which I found very effective as the assistant producer. Brian was well-versed in Imgur, and I was not. However, I used this to our advantage. When I first went on the site, I was overwhelmed by the hundreds of pictures that were thrown at me, so Brian wrote out a list of key points he wanted to discuss in the podcast. I took that list, went onto the site, and started doing some research. Along the way, I wrote down questions and certain points I wanted to discuss in response to his ideas. Afterwards, we just sat down and started recording. I found that this was a much better conversation and we were still discussing all the points related to new media while actually having a conversation. Overall, I feel that we have improved from the last podcast.

For this project, I thought it would be interesting to focus on the demographics of the intergenerational mobility. Looking at the data, 4 sections that stood out to me were geography, childhood environment and gender gaps, neighborhoods and parent’s income. I think those factors encompass a good socioeconomic background. To simply analyze the parent’s income does not give enough information. Although income is a major factor in a child’s success, I believe the environment they grow up in is more important. As we were discussing in class, I think splitting the project up into 4 groups would be helpful and more effective. I feel that it might be easier to split into groups after we decide which subjects/factors to focus on, whether that be different colleges or different factors, such as the ones listed above.

This process has made me realize my lack of skills in interviewing and it was one of the main obstacles of this assignment. I can carry on a conversation very easily but I felt that my questions were too bland to understand her personality and thoughts. If I were to interview another student, I try to pose better questions before starting the interview. I think any form of video chatting would be the most effective method for this assignment because it allows for constant dialog.

The listening project did a good job of letting us work on digital citizenship, as we are publishing the thoughts and ideas of the student we are interviewing. It also incorporates the Writing as a Process learning outcome of this course. This project pushes us to interview, extract that data, compile it into a post, and reflect on it. By sending it to the student we were in contact with, we are more open to revision and editing.

I still believe that meeting someone online takes longer to achieve an honest, natural dialogue and relationship. Sara was great to talk to and I enjoyed our hour long conversation, but in that time, I didn’t get to truly know her nor did I expect to. I believe that one’s mannerisms, tone, and voice are essential to personality and individuality. I suppose you can achieve that on some level with video chatting, but there is something different when talking in person. There is a sense of vulnerability and intimacy. There is less of a distance and therefore, it’s more difficult to be dishonest about yourself than if you are chatting hundreds of miles away from each other. Nevertheless, I found this project to be interesting and enlightening on how we meet others online.

Our overarching goal with this podcast was to get listeners familiar with Stanton’s work, strategy and implementation of new media writing. We focused on strategy for a bit because we believe that it contributed to the purpose of the blog. As I just mentioned, the photos and stories he captured was to get the audience in touch with reality, as well as to remind us to not judge a book by its cover. In terms of making the podcast, expressing our thoughts on the content and its relations to new media was surprisingly easy. Brian and I met up a couple times before just to discuss and brainstorm about the website and we felt that talking it out helped us a lot with that we wanted to say. I also wanted to include some clips of Brandon Stanton discussing his purpose and strategy so listeners know that we aren’t simply speculating his motives and goals. The most difficult part was establishing a flow in our discussion. We wrote a script to make sure we covered all the content necessary but in the end it sounded as scripted as it looked on paper. I think for our next podcast, we will be working on creating more of a discussion and editing our podcast afterwards to include the important points.

SOURCES:

“Brandon Stanton: The Good Story.” Ted Talk at Columbia University.
“On how I approach strangers in the street: Humans of New York creator Brandon Stanton: UCD, Dublin.”
“Humans of New York’s Brandon Stanton on Trump.” Interview with Katie Couric with Yahoo Global News.

mp3:

In this episode of the Web We Weave, we will analyze the multimedia platform that is the Humans of New York. Created by Brandon Stanton initially as a photography project, HONY has become an iconic blog. Its pictures of average, everyday people on the streets of New York City, accompanied by a quote, allows us to take a glimpse at their personal lives. Today we will be discussing the strategies Brandon Stanton uses in making such successful posts as well as how he utilizes new media strategies to his advantage as he attracts over 20 million followers on his sites.

Sources:

“Brandon Stanton: The Good Story.” Ted Talk at Columbia University.
“On how I approach strangers in the street: Humans of New York creator Brandon Stanton: UCD, Dublin.”
“Humans of New York’s Brandon Stanton on Trump.” Interview with Katie Couric with Yahoo Global News.

This is an idea I had for the potential logo by playing around with some fonts and images. I emphasized WWW more than the “web we weave” and kept it in a simple black and white color scheme. This image took on a more literal approach, which is why I focused on “www.” to convey that the goal of this podcast was to analyze new media writing.