For micro-project 2, Amanda, Mun Cheng and I wanted to see how much people were willing to share with others regarding their mental health or daily life on social media. We set out to ask the questions “How was your day” and “Are you okay” to see how many authentic responses we would be able to gather.

The platform we chose to use was Instagram as we felt like it was the fastest way we could reach a larger audience compared to other social media platforms. Also, we decided to use all 3 of our accounts to get a larger sample size and utilise the various functions Instagram has to offer: poll, questions and Instagram live.

We do however recognise that this crowd-sourced project is only accessible to people with internet, a smart device, an Instagram account and who follow us online. Therefore audience pool is not very diverse.

Our crowd-sourced project involves social interaction as it requires the audience to engage and respond to our questions. However, in the case of all 3 accounts, there are many people who viewed the questions we ave posed and chose not to respond. Perhaps that in itself is telling of how a large majority of people online are unwilling to share information on their day or wellbeing.

This project is different from one that is created by a single artist as our project requires multiple responses. With just a single creator, we will only be able to attain a single perspective.

INSTAGRAM POLL
I carried out the Instagram poll after our class session as I felt the need to diversify our mode of garnering responses. In regards to how much control us as creators have over this project we’ve created, I would say that Instagram poll gives us the most control as we only limit the audience to 2 options to choose from. Additionally, we were able to gather more replies with Instagram poll and I think this is due to the fact that although I (the account holder) can share the results, they will only appear to my audience as statistics, and not reveal who in the audience had chosen which option.

INSTAGRAM QUESTIONS
As for Instagram questions, there were less responses gathered possibly due to two reasons. #1 is that the audience had no options to choose from and thus are required to type in their own thoughts and #2 is that their responses could be shared with the account holders followers. However, one way in which some respondents replied to the questions without the option of us sharing their response is through direct messaging. In the case of the Instagram questions, us as the creators of the project have far less control of the results as the response section is a free-for-all that would not censor or eliminate anything the responders type. Therefore, we see some of the respondents deflecting the questions and replying with unrelated messages.

We as creators also recognise that we may have affected the results as we did expose to the audience that this project was for school and this may have affected how or whether or not our viewers choose to engage.

INSTAGRAM LIVE
For the last function, Instagram Live, I felt that we had the least amount of control over the project. In Instagram Live, the account holder can respond to the audience in real time, and the audiences can communicate among themselves, with everything they share being broadcasted. Therefore, we see respondents replying to the Live with off-topic, unrelated comments. Additionally, Instagram Live gives certain audiences the option of joining the Live video, which we tried, allowing the person joining to possibly “hijack” our stream and the direction of the experiment.

(Unfortunately, due to our lousy skills in dealing with our own pieces of tech, we didn’t manage to capture the audio of the Instagram live. So below we’ve gathered and listed all the responses)

the plus side of Instagram Live is that when a video is started, a notification is sent to all the account-holder’s followers, which may result in a larger viewership in a short amount of time compared to the other functions.
an issue we encountered was that poor connection on the account holder’s side may jeopardise the experiment

as mentioned above, only certain viewers are able to join the Instagram live video and also, the account holder has the option to accept or decline the request, which still offers a level of control to us.    
after the request is accepted, another notification would be sent to both the account holder, and the new Live member’s followers. an issue we encountered was that as we verbally asked the questions, every time a new audience joins the Live video, we the creators have to repeat the question, which becomes repetitive for the other viewers. This led us to leave a comment message with the question, but if the other members engage and reply, the original question would be moved up along the comment stream and be lost.
an option that Instagram offers is for the account holder to share the entire live video with their followers for the next 24 hours. Perhaps this would result in more followers responding, or the original audience to hold back from responding authentically as they have the knowledge that anything they have shared would be continuously broadcasted to strangers.