January 5, 2010 Jill

Date my bro

Social Media Week is February 1-5, 2010.  It’s an international five day event being held simultaneously in New York City, Berlin, London, San Francisco, Toronto and São Paulo to “explore the profound impact that social media has on culture, business communications and society at large.”

I think it’s a great opportunity to use the social media to tell some stories about how social media are affecting relationships.  Do you want to help me do it?

J Date convert

doomed

The Idea

The Social Media Week Story Project

an original comedy about relationships and social media
told entirely in the social media
and presented live February 1-5 2010.

If the girl you’ve been crushing on changes her relationship status to single, do you have to wait more than an hour before asking her out?

Is it okay to check your JDate profile for new matches during a first date?

Is it wrong to set up a Twitter account under a fake name to stalk your own child?

After your first love reconnects on Facebook, do you have to tell your husband?

Is it wrong for a married woman to flirt with total strangers on Twitter?  What if they live on another continent?

Social networks are changing the nature of human relationships.  The aim of the SMW Story Project is to tell some these of stories.

Empathy is the theme of the story project.  Empathy is the fuel that drives social media and the building block of community.  It’s our hope that our funny little story will allow us to understand our fellow human beings a little better.

from Tw to Fb

The Process

1. Blog the experiment from beginning to end, starting with a call for writers, actors, designers and anyone else who might want to collaborate in the project and continuing through every stage.

2. Mine the web to find out how social media is affecting human relationships.
Using a variety of tags, we’ll check out what people are talking about when it comes to dating, friendships, family and social web.  Mothers stalking their kids on Twitter, boyfriends who won’t update the Facebook relationship status, long lost friends who find you through your blog.
(Make all this data publicly available in a FriendFeed group so that anyone interested in the project can add, comment on or favourite the material or use it to create their own characters to interact with the characters and storylines we create.)

parent stalking

3. Put together a story room of five or six smart, funny writers to turn the data into story arcs.

4.  Have each writer create a character on the web using social media tools like blogs, social bookmarking, FriendFeed and Twitter.
They can cast actors to “play” their character in profile pictures, photo albums and other media they may develop.

son relationship

5. Set up a central website with links to each character’s social media footprint, RSS feeds, widgets and the schedule of performances.

6. During Social Media Week play out the stories of our characters through their social networking activities.
In addition to blogs, podcasts, photo albums and social bookmarks, our characters will meet on Twitter at specified performance times to enact scenes in the dramatic narrative.  These will be improvised by the writers based on scene outlines (think Curb Your Enthusiasm).  Audience members may tune into “watch”.  They can chat with the characters.  Or they may even create their own characters and participate in the drama.
mum gay

Thanks Fb

7.  In the final days of Social Media Week, host a free panel discussion to talk about the project and tell stories from the trenches.

single ads

The Call to Action

If you want to be part of the writing team, drop me an email to let me know.  If we haven’t worked together before attach a short writing sample please.

There are lots of other ways to participate besides writing.  We’ll need someone to help set up websites and manage RSS feeds.  We could definitely use some design elements.  There are probably tons of things I haven’t anticipated yet. If you want to participate in other ways, let me know how you can help.

Send email to Story2oh (at) gmail (etcetera).

Comments (2)

  1. I’m not quite sure if I get this… are you are talking about:

    1. mining real people’s personal relationship information from facebook, and then

    2. making it all publicly available by rebroadcasting it through blogs and friendfeed,

    3. writers will turn the information gathered into story arcs and

    4. create fictional characters which will be put into facebook and twitter as though they are real people to act out a drama for a week?

    5. somehow the people using facebook and twitter will know that “performances” are going.

    Is that correct?

    This sounds like a minefield.

  2. admin

    Y’think? I guess that’s why I call it Running With My Eyes Closed.
    “Mining real people’s stories”: mostly cruising the web and seeing what people are talking about, reading tweets and blog posts. It’s the kind of research I normally do to build a story; listening to people.
    “making it public”: I need to put what I find in one place to share it with the other writers anyway. Why not let the audience in?
    “writers…arc”: no prob there, standard fare.
    “create characters”: did I say Facebook, no I don’t think I did. Did I say “as though they are real people”? No, don’t think so. Done that. This time, we’ll make sure everything is really clearly tagged as fiction.
    “know when performances are”: they figure out what time to get to the movie theatre don’t they? they can program their PVRs. I think people will be able to figure out how to “watch” a scene unfold at a specified time on Twitter. People managed to show up in droves to play Bingo with ze frank.
    That’s not to say it isn’t a minefield, but I think what’s laid out is very do-able.

Comments are closed.

CONTACT