REFLECTION:
When beginning this assignment we decided that it was important to create something that we, ourselves, would connect with. As Landrow said “Blogging, the latest internet craze, has major importance for anyone interested in hypertext because one form of it provides the first widely available means on the Web of allowing the active reader-author” (Landrow, G. 2006).
‘Once Upon a Sentence’ tells an unpredictable story. Similar to Human’s of New York, the Facebook phenomenon, we wanted to tell a visual story that could also be transformed onto a number of different mediums and therefore become a hypertext.
The story itself will consist of different chapters, each chapter contains 25 photos that will be uploaded daily onto Instagram and also shared on our Facebook page. Once the 25 photos have been uploaded the story will be made into one video and uploaded to our ‘Once Upon a Sentence’ YouTube channel. As the page becomes more popular, there would be an opportunity to actively engage our target audience by asking them to send in a photo and a sentence to be used in the next chapter. This is where we have allowed and encouraged the ‘active reader-author’, and created our very own form of a ‘hypertext’ (Landrow, G. 2006). The story can then be accessed through the YouTube Channel and people will have the ability to watch it in the order that they desire.
Similarly, another hypertext example we looked at in class, and that has helped shape our project is ‘The Happiness Project’. We liked the idea that it linked you to the previous body of work that was created 50 years earlier and you had the ability to watch and understand the story they were telling in a number of different ways. This is why we would include links to all of our social platforms so people can navigate through the stories as they pleased.
While we ideally wanted to attract a large and diverse audience, we believe that our audience going forward will mostly consist of people around the same age as ourselves. This is because our age group are the most active and willing users of the above social media platforms and are also the most willing to engage in different platforms whilst using social media.
With the Internet becoming more advanced and the consumers of it becoming more ‘network literate’ (Miles, A, 2007), ‘Once Upon a Sentence’ has the ability to continue and grow. Much the same as Human’s of New York, which is now across a number of different online platforms that all link together to tell the story, we would hope that as ‘Once Upon a Sentence’ grew, it could become much the same.
Caitlin Min Fa 