https://jbrodriguezsite.wordpress.com
Since this project required the participation of a community, it was interesting to see its development thought the period it was publicly available. Although the idea of social medias is to make us believe that we can easily reach out to anyone and make connections, it is a different story to invite others to reach out. When I first posted my invitation on Facebook, it took a good hour before I got any response. This was surprising to me considering how quick people have engaged in some of my previous posts. Additionally, with over 1000 friends, I was expecting great participation. But this one was different since it was asking something specific rather than indirectly inviting anyone to share their opinion. It was posted at a prime time when there's usually a great amount of activity on Facebook but still failed to reach out people. At first, it seems that the invitation of sharing a weird dream was perhaps a little too intimidating. After a few hours, more people started to engage but participation was still low. It is interesting that I had to manually extend invitation to some of my friends to get the conversation going. After some more inputs, more and more people engaged and finally I was able to reach a great level of participation.
I think it is fair to say that communities engaging in new media want it to be simple. People are also more willing to engage if it comes on their own. New Media seems to be a culture of "we only engage when its convenient." We read emails and texts whenever we want and reply also whenever we want. In the end, community still engage but those factors (and many others) definitely affect participation.
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