People share and participate in every kind of daily action, interest, obsession, no matter how trivial or mundane. I refer to this as super-participation: sharing and posting the events and personal detals of one’s life on a daily and sometimes hourly basis.
For A Day in the Life of Super-Participation project, each group of five students will create a Facebook page where they share everything they do for a 24-hour period, including school activity, meals, online media, music, location, parties. One of the students in the group can create the page with their account, be sure it is public, and give it a name according to your interests, or just something whimsical.
Pick one day during the recess to carry out this project. Students then share and comment on each other’s posts, as often as possible. You can share anything you like, and you can also share posts onto your own timeline. If anyone asks to join your group, feel free to let them in. Make it active, vibrant, fun. You can create images, download memes, share YouTube videos, anything is possible and allowed, there are no restrictions. This is DIWO via social media as a super-participatory and collaborative day in the life of your group and your Facebook friends who also participate.
After completing the super-participatory day, write an OSS post describing the results of the micro-project, examining the kinds of things that were shared, whether they were personal, trivial, intellectual, etc. Also examine the motivation behind super-participation, and how it becomes an extension and expression of our digital lives and identity. Think about whether or not we try to create a persona or image of ourselves through the things that we share via social media. Do we only share certain things, do we filter out things we don’t want people to know about?
When we return from the break, I want each group to give a presentation and discuss the results of your day of super-participation, sharing with the class how we increasingly live our lives in an open source, transparent, collaborative, and collective manner. In other words, have we all become artists of the social practice in our use of social media? Are we all involved in DIWO activity through communications technology? These are some of the questions and issues we want to address for our next class on digital identity.
