For this week's assignment, I thought it would be fun to compile a bunch of horror stories from classmates. This was definitely inspired by Dead End Fiction on Twitter. I also started noticing some friends from my academic circles tweeting with the hashtags #shortacademichorrorstory, #shortacademichorrorstories, #academichorrorstory and #academichorrorstories. I think #socialfiction of this nature is popular on Twitter because people from that field/area of interest can relate to the horror stories and probably have experienced them themselves. All of us taking this course have shared both joy and frustration about our course, INTE5340, on Twitter, and within a few minutes of posting my first tweet as @INTE5340horror, I started getting other students in our class to tweet their horror stories. I also posted a few of my own horror stories to get people started and to provide a template for the types of tweets I was looking for. As @inte5340horror, I retweeted other people's #inte5340horrorstories. And as people's feeds got flooded with tweets with this hashtag, I think I stirred up some confusion over what this was. But with that confusion came more tweets, so causing a bit of a buzz was beneficial for my collecting of stories. As people posted their stories, I added them to a Twitter Moment, since this is a clean, easy way to curate and post related tweets. I also like how Twitter Moments can be embedded rather easily into your website.
One of the challenges I faced this week was keeping track of which Twitter account I was posting from! There were times I meant to "like" something as myself but was using the @inte5340horror profile. And vice versa. Another challenge was keeping people interested in continuing to post horror stories throughout the week. I got a lot of buzz in the first 2 days, but then interest died down. When that happened, I would tweet a new horror story to "remind" people of the project. The most tweeted horror stories revolved around using hypothes.is and finding Easter eggs. Overall, I think this was a successful social project. I was able to get a decent level of class participation, and I loved seeing everyone's creativity. I like that for this project, most entries were crowdsourced. In my last social media based assignment , all of the content was produced by me. In this project, storytelling was collaborative and participatory, adding diversity of content, media and voice. Check out all the horror story entries in the Twitter Moment below! INTE5340, you guys are awesome!
Assignment 7 - Social Fiction - #inte5340horrorstory compilation
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