The presentation of our research projects compelled Michelle and I to sit down and selectively choose the themes we wanted to focus on for our podcasts. For our presentation we introduced privacy and community as reoccuring motifs and provided some analysis on them. In the end, we asked the class what they themselves were interested in concerning communication with millennials:
- Etiquette of messaging online during certain situations (i.e. breaking up with someone over text, consoling a friend over a sad event)
- Microaggressions over text messages or social media like the sharing of memes/gifs that can be construed as blackface.
- Is being uncomfortable when calling people on the phone intergenerational?
- Is there a movement towards the use of facetime? How different is facetime from texting? Is it more instant than texting?
- Reasons to keep messages
- Changing our language is a form of socialization?
- Use of read receipts and how it becomes a part of messaging etiquette. Read receipts add meaning to the message even though it is not part of the context nor contributes to the context.
- Emotional attachment to how we perform over technology
- Features on facebook dictates how/why we use it – shifts the way we use apps/technology
These suggestions were certainly interesting though they are mostly concerned with the unwritten rules or stereotypical behavior seen on messaging. I think a lot of them are too specific and not broad enough for the research Michelle and I are doing. We asked the class for suggestions because we were unsure of what our third podcast episode should be about but we have decided to instead cater our series to the information we have received through these interviews. In the end, we were unable to utilize our peer’s comments on our presentation.
Our three-part podcast will instead be focused on privacy, authenticity and presentation. After re-listening to our interviews, Michelle and I found that we did not have as much material on community as we thought. Still we put work into this theme and since we have shifted our focus from community, I wish there were some way to also present that aspect of our research. It is difficult to extract only certain quotes and about 9 minutes of audio out of the hours we have recorded with our respondents. I am feeling the same challenges of writing a paper on a broad topic in only a 2-page paper. We have acquired so many information but the way we are presenting our research only allows us to show so much.
Although in the past logs Michelle and I have expressed our preference in the casual style of our interviews, we regret the lack of structure of our conversations now that we are editing the audio files for our podcast. In one interview, our pair of respondents are yelling over each other which certainly changes the mood of our podcast and makes it difficult to edit the sounds. The informal discussions also make me wish that we took the interviews more seriously. There are very nice quotes in our episodes where our respondent is very articulate with their answer then there are others where the interviewee is unable to express their sentiments succinctly. It will be interesting to see the end product of our study as we continue to narrow down our information for this research.