Our last assignment for Contemporary Media Issues was an interesting one. We were to create a fictional character and give it life through the use of Facebook and two other websites. Channel 4 uses Social websites to promote shows by impersonating as their fictional characters.
I was to work with Ian Gardener, Joel Jerome Airey and James Dunn for this project. We discussed different ideas and stories, but were trending too deep into the lands of the cliche, such as a person being stalked or someone going through a bad break up.
James proposed an idea for a character that would be the image of the word pretentious. A man who listens to music by unknown artists, reads obscure books and has a very extreme, left wing view on the world. He would try to be a musician, but we were to aim for him to be terrible and to be hated by the online world. With the help of a random name generator, John Place was born.
We were given two weeks to make this character real and decided to create content, such as photos and a song, to make this character as real as possible. We did not receive much response from John Place, other than from different fake characters. We tried to provoke people on YouTube by abusing popular songs, but no one went for the bait.
None the less, a lot of people became Facebook friends with John Place, some of these people are those who I know from home. I was shocked how easily they decided to respond to a friend request on someone they didn't know. One person actually wrote on John Place's page, asking if he knew him or not.
I enjoyed this assignment, but I already experienced this form of storytelling with the Google Map Narrative, as my group and I created fake online characters to speak dialogue through email and blogs, so for this assignment, I simply followed the same format.
I was disappointed with the lack of response for John Place, perhaps if we had more time, we could have created more songs and Tumblr posts to further establish his character. But the biggest disappointment of them all was the lack of story for John Place. If I was to take on this task again, I would have planed out a story, so that our Facebook friends would be an audience and would follow the drama of John Place's life, much like a social network drama.
Still here is a link to the Facebook Page of John Place
