For the first piece this semester, I looked at publics that are specifically formed on Facebook and wrote about Erin Brokovich's posts.
I was interested in being able to see the ways in which specific ideas move through communities, so I looked at some of Brokovich's posts, trying to gain what information I could about them. I was able to see the posts themselves and to see the number of people that had liked or commented on those posts, but there was a lot of information missing from the outsiders perspective.
So, when I thought about what I wanted to do for my going public assignment, I found myself hoping to find some answers about the spread of ideas on Facebook. To do this, I created a new public, a group that was centered around planning an event in support of marijuana legalization in conjunction with other cities all over the world participating in the same event.
The idea was that on May 7th we would close main street and orchestrate a peaceful demonstration in the form of a march from downtown to the courthouse on Main street.
At first, everything seemed to be going great. I created my group and started inviting people to join that I knew were supportive of the cause. Then, those people started adding people, and so on. Overnight, the group seemed to explode. By the next morning, I had 213 members interested in going to my event.
What's more, I could now access the kind of data that I was interested in finding when I was working on the first assignment: data surrounding the spread of ideas online and the way in which an online public is formed. Whenever I posted, I could see a little counter that told me how many people had seen my post, as well as who liked it, shared it, or commented on it, Even if someone shared the post, I got notifications about the post's activity on the other person's page.
The experience was extremely eye-opening for me. I could see that certain members of the growing community were more active than others, and the more active the members were, the more people they brought into the public. I started to think of them in two ways: active participators(those who contributed to the conversation and spread of the message), and static participators(those who observed the conversation or replied to discourse, but offered no new topics and recruited no new members). Only four or five people of the original people that I added to the group were active recruiters, but they each brought their own members and some even contributed to the discourse that was occurring within my micro-public.
About a week after the creation of my group, a few of the active participators and I met online for a meeting that was geared at spreading the word for the event and discussing the specifics. We discussed the location, message, and the costs involved and discussed the tasks that lay ahead of us.
One of the foremost tasks ahead in order to close Main Street, I had to get an event permit, which required permission from all of the local businesses that would be possibly affected by the closure. Unfortunately, the businesses I talked to were unwilling to sign off on the event as it was a Saturday and the nature of the event was not particularly good for business for them. Almost before the march was conceived, we were shot down. After talking again with some of the active participators, we came to the conclusion that the Main Street option was the only one we could conceivably afford and we no longer had time on our side for trying to find a new location for the event and we canned the idea.
Even though I was unable to pull it off entirely, I was still able to create a space for discourse that surrounded a controversial issue and to pull people together to form a very small counterpublic. I learned a lot about what kind of intense planning goes into political activism such as marching for a cause and I formed many new contacts with people who have similar views to myself converning the legal status of marijuana consumption.
