Connor Emmel
Intrepid/loquacious/gregarious
English 111- DJ Portfolio
/Inquiry 4
Connor Emmel
Eng 111-DJ
Inquiry Four Plan
19 November 2014
Game Plan
To start off, I was quite behind on my idea for inquiry four. I was scrambling mainly because I have only written inquires over Vector Marketing and I kind of wanted to switch it up and work with another subject. I tested the waters and threw some texts and emails out into the world of technology. Those messages generated some responses and I decided to group up with Patrick and Megan. Patrick went to a school that I played hockey against in high school and I met Megan through classes and we became friends so I am excited to be working with them!
For inquiry four we have decided to go with Patrick’s topic of ISIS. It’s a relevant issue because the problem with ISIS has yet to be solved so a lot of people should be interested in it. Our game plan is to attack social media by using twitter. We are going to create our own account and hope to gain followers to raise awareness about this cause. The cause, in this case, is that America has not directly gone to fight ISIS and we are just trying to raise awareness about this. To do this we will be making memes. The memes will have pictures of anything related to ISIS. It can be anything from people to weapons to flags and anything else. On these pictures we hope to gain attention by creating funny captions that will raise awareness about the current event. The way we will gain followers and raise awareness is through retweets and favorites. Another way we hope to get our memes in front of a lot of people is by having an already existing terrorist account tweet one of our memes. This may or may not happen depending on whether or not the account owner is a nice guy or a jerk. If we are able to accomplish this it will be outstanding because tens of thousands of people will be able to see a meme we created! One of the main reasons we chose to go about doing inquiry four this way is because we didn’t want to be boring because we have a serious topic. We wanted to bring some light hearted comedy and in a way, like satire to this topic. Going along with that, we thought the best place to advertise would be on twitter. This is because just putting up flyers wouldn’t be able to gain traction. For example, if we put up a hilariously funny meme on a poster board some people are going to see it and they may tell a couple of their friends about it and then it’s going to stop there. On twitter, our meme can get a few retweets then it has the potential to gain some momentum and spiral out of control with the amount of people that are available to retweet it.
All in all, I’m really looking forward to this group project. Our game plan is to get together tonight and knock out the memes. We’re also going to make our twitter account and actively work to gain some followers. Once the account is finished our job is just to keep the stream of memes coming. We must make sure that they are funny enough for people to get a chuckle and give us a retweet. If we can do that we have the potential to get our memes in front a large number of people!
Inquiry 4 Game Plan
Connor Emmel
English 111-DJ
Inquiry IV
2 December 2014
A Walk to Remember
“Connor, a twitter account called @randomisisguy just followed me. Should I be worried?” “What the hell is @randomisisguy following me for?” Those were just a few quotes that my friends, so earnestly, asked me. Of course, no true friend could ever be up front right away, so I responded with “Weird bro.” Later on, I did break the news to them that it was me who followed them and they should have nothing to be alarmed or concerned about! Now, let’s get down to business. @randomisisguy is all about bringing public awareness to a really relevant issue: the pieces of shit who call themselves Isis. As a group we felt the need to educate teens and young adults about this topic who may have zero to little knowledge of what’s going on in the rest of the world. Of course were not going to try and make a bunch of teens and young adults watch hours of political shows where half the time all they do is argue and talk over one another to impose dominance. That wouldn’t be looked at for a second by our target audience. With that said, we thought what better way than to bring education and facts to a mode that is mainly consumed by teens claiming to have “Swag” and Kim Kardashians ass. If you think I know what mode I’m talking about and guessed twitter, then as rapper OG Maco rapped in his hit song U Guessed It, all I have to say to you “Bitch you guessin! (WHO!) Yous right!” By using Twitter, we educated ourselves, as well as teens 16 and up to young adults in their twenties about our public issue in hopes that they act and a change is made.
One of the main reasons we decided to use Twitter is because this type of social media has one of the largest demographics of teens and young adults. Currently I have about 4000 tweets. To put that in perspective, some of my friends who have had their accounts for the same amount of time have over 15,000 tweets. My point is, people use Twitter constantly all day! Now that we selected our mode to communicate our purpose, to bring public awareness about United States of America’s situation with Isis, we had to decide how we should best communicate our information on twitter. At first we were thinking just tweeting facts but then realized that was an utterly horrible idea. At that moment, we thought, why did we all dismiss that so quickly? What we realized from our failure helped us discover the way we ended up communicating to our audience. We realized tweets about facts would bore people and they wouldn’t have any interest because the main thing those tweets would have lacked is HUMORJJJ! All of the videos we watched in class where you taught us valuable lessons all had humor portrayed in some way which made us feel even better that we chose to incorporate humor while communicating with our audience. After all that, we knew that we had to be funny with our presentation of information and we ended up going with a popular thing now days: memes! By using memes, we were able build pathos with our audience while simultaneously educating them.
When we created our memes, we had a ton of fun. I laughed harder than I ever have during a project for school which was a good thing! The pictures for our memes mainly consisted of stereotypical terrorist pictures. Middle Eastern guys with guns, flags, and covered faces. On these pictures we put captions that all had the same common theme, The United States of America have not gone in and fought Isis on the ground. As I said earlier, the most important part of these memes is that they had to be funny! I subtly foreshadowed how we did this earlier by using a quote from a popular song. We used quotes such as “They see me rollin, they hatin” from the song “Ridin” by Chamillionaire and “Please stand up” from “The Real Slim Shady” by Eminem. Most of our target audience have heard these songs and would instantly understand the reference and hopefully laugh as they thought back a couple years since these are both throwbacks. Some other examples we used spoofs on popular tag lines such as YOLO and Just Do It. We changed YOLO (you only live once) to YOSAO (you only shoot Americans once) and applied Just Do It to a place you wouldn’t think it would be applied. Follow us on Twitter, @randomisisguy to learn more.
Overall, there is room for improvement with our purpose. The reason being, our twitter account only has four followers. Three of which are Pat, Megan and me. The other follower of course, is Cowboy. We haven’t gained traction on social media yet but we hope our account and memes catch on. I was also unable to get one of our memes tweeted on an established terrorist account or other spoof accounts because all the account owners were jerks, straight up. Our purpose throughout the project was not changed and we stuck to our guns to bring relevance to this public issue. We hoped that teens and young adults we see these memes and act to make change to get America go in on the ground and combat Isis. During this project I learned a skill that I will use for the rest of my life. This skill is the knowledge of how to rhetorically communicate through social media. I learned it is much easier said than done but next time I need to utilize this skill I will be way ahead of the competition because this project and this class!
Inquiry 4 Final
