Autobotography Approach- JimB

My College Life Through Snapchat

The idea for this project is that I spend an entire day, from when I wake up in the morning to when I go to bed at night, documenting a day in my life as a college student through social media, specifically the app known as Snapchat.

For my approach, I decided that I would do a warm up exercise of sorts. For this, instead of documenting the whole day by making posts from when I wake up to when I go to bed, I decided I would start to make posts throughout the day as soon as I wake up, and then be done making posts by the time I get home from school. I decided to do this so that I could get a feel for what it would be like if I decided to do this as a final project.

Something else that’s worthy of noting too is that while I was given the suggestion to tell my Snapchat followers about this project on Snapchat ahead of time, I actually decided not to because I thought that not doing so would make it more interesting, depending on whether or not I would get a chance to see how my followers reacted to what I was doing, or if they would ever catch on.

The whole point of the project is to show a certain aspect of my life that I normally don’t show on Snapchat. Normally whenever I post something on Snapchat, I usually only post things that I think are funny and that’s it. Even then I almost rarely post anything on Snapchat anymore. The point of this project is to show a certain aspect of my life to my Snapchat followers that I normally don’t show, even the more mundane and boring aspects, as well as mention some of my feelings throughout the day. As a result of this, I decided that it would be more interesting if I didn’t tell them about this project ahead of time. This way my Snapchat stories could potentially take my followers more by surprise than they would otherwise if I did tell them in advance, and I could see what they’re reactions would be like. The way I see it, things like this normally have less impact when you know what to expect compared to when you don’t.

Surely enough, I did get one reaction to one of my stories. It was a pretty nice reaction too.

Since my audience consists of all of my Snapchat followers, my audience would consist of say 35-40 people depending on how many people go on Snapchat that day. These people all include my girlfriend, as well close friends of mine and people that I used to know back in high school.

I made roughly 50 posts for my project approach.

Budget(financial):
While I already had everything I needed for this project to begin with, having gotten an iPhone in December of my senior year of high school, and getting Snapchat on my phone a month later, the financial budget is as follows:

iPhone 5s: $195.00
Snapchat: $2.00

total: $197.00

Budget(time):
When I did my Approach on Thursday, I started right when I woke up at 8 in the morning, and made my last post on Snapchat related to this project at around 3:45 in the afternoon when I got home, so time-wise the budget for the approach was 7 hours and 45 minutes.

If I were to make this my final project I would make this project last an entire day from when I wake up in the morning until I go to bed at night. I would not only show what a day at school is like, and what a morning on a school day is like, but also what the rest of the day when I get home is like. This would also show my Snapchat followers what the rest of my day at home is like once I’m home.