If I learned anything this week it is that nothing beats going to a community event run by local people for local people to connect in person through shared concerns, visions and care for the place we live, Woolwich. And, the last two weeks I have also been mulling over how I use social media to keep up to date with local happenings, and how my own online presence for my artistic practice and research might be helped by interacting with others online. The latter has been prompted by the ‘23 Things for Research: digital tools for your professional and personal development’ course ran by University of Surrey. In fact, the way I found out about this community event was on my daily search “Woolwich” on Twitter.
So, taking a ‘killing two birds with one stone’ approach, at the community meeting led by Speak Out Woolwich I tweeted comments from the speakers to engage with local Twitter accounts as well as having good old fashioned, actual conversations with my Woolwich neighbours. For me, the real-life interactions are what count the most (no surprise there). Yet the support that Twitter (@dizzfort), Instagram (@lizzfort), Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn can provide help to keep me more informed about local goings on from a range of perspectives, angles and agendas. That said, broadening the diversity of people I follow on social media and engage with removes the potential of being in an echo chamber [only sharing ideas and views with people that have the same ideas and views as me].
In other news, my 24 year old friend Freya showed me how to post an Instagram story (yes I know, late the the party), and so I published a series of photos from one of my walks this weeks, and got ‘creative’ with the 1st Duke of Wellington…
What I haven’t got my head round yet is linking these platforms and being a bit more savvy with regular postings to develop my online community interactions. I found out about using something like Hootsuite for this but I am not sure whether this is right for this project just yet. I also need to starting publishing every 2 weeks on my blog, moving towards weekly to get into the habit of writing regularly. This is, after all, one of the modes of documentation for my practice based research. OK, that’s all for now.
woolwich wandering 