The story that I told in class was the story of how I decided to start my own online company. In class, I felt that I was not able to go into as much detail as I would have liked. In this assignment, I plan on elaborating more about what essentially brought me to the idea of starting my own e-commerce clothing brand.
Rewinding back to a few years ago, I suddenly got the idea of trying to start my own company and essentially wanting to sell a product. I don’t know how exactly I came to the realization that I wanted to start my own company, but I knew that it was something I definitely wanted to try. I knew that I wanted my name on a product and that I wanted to create something that people used on the daily. The first product I was trying to sell was my homemade hair masks. I was in love with anything beauty and I wanted to try to make my own product that people could use at home to enhance their beauty overall. After buying a ton of mason jars and mixing both egg, olive oil and mayo together, I decided to use my boyfriend as a guinea pig and test my hair masks on him. Not only did it make his hair extremely greasy, but it was horribly messy. I had the feeling that my hair masks were not the route I wanted to go down.
After some evaluation, I decided to try making body scrubs. I put the mason jars that I purchased to use and started concocting. I bought a heaping abundance of body lotion, sugar, food coloring, fruit extracts and started getting to work. I came up with names for my body scrubs that sounded appealing like “Creamy Coconut” and “Orange Creamsickle”. I even made an Instagram page and a Tumblr page for my body scrubs as well. I tried selling my products on Etsy, however I started getting the feeling again that my body scrubs weren’t going to work out.
I knew I had to think of a different approach but I really had no idea what else to start selling. One time I took my old hair extensions and dyed them different colors. I tried to sell each of my funky hair accessories for fifteen dollars each, but that idea soon came to an end as well.
Finally, I came up with an idea that I knew that I wanted to invest in. After coming across a friend’s Instagram page, I noticed that she was selling crewneck sweatshirts. After doing some investigating, I noticed that she had a YouTube channel with over 17,000 subscribers! It was at that moment that I decided that I wanted to start a YouTube channel and work on being a beauty and fashion influencer. I created my channel back in 2016 and I worked at it for over two years. I had the privilege to work with several beauty companies and help advertise their products. I noticed that for a little while I had stopped worrying about selling my own products and I worried more about branding myself on the internet. However, after many sleepless nights due to spending hours editing, my channel became more of a chore and a complete stress to me. I noticed over that time I developed severe anxiety. Although I suffered with anxiety before, my anxiety had never been this out of hand. I knew it was time to sit down and reevaluate again.
After taking some time off of YouTube and just focusing on enjoying myself and my life overall, I knew I was ready to jump back into another project. One day at work, I thought to myself how I wanted to start my own company. I came up with the idea of selling loungewear and channeling my style into a project. I wanted to see myself in something that I created. I contacted a friend of mine, who has had a ton of experience in creating online companies, and we got to work. My mentor had asked me what my purpose in starting this company essentially was because we needed to get down to the nitty gritty about what my company was going to be about. After much thinking and much accessing, I noticed that I was the type that always kept grinding and wanting to work on something that I could call my own someday. I noticed the reason as to why I wanted to create a company was because I am happiest and less stressed when I am focusing on a positive project. I felt like working on a project was a way of coping with my anxiety. It was at that moment that I decided I wanted to start a clothing company that raised anxiety awareness.
Until this day, I have been working alongside my mentor and I have been watching my company come to life. I have finally found the project worth working on. In starting this business, I am learning all of the steps to starting a company properly and slowly I am watching my dreams come true. I am the happiest I have ever been and my anxiety has been moderately low. We are hoping to launch my company, Nova & Skye, sometime in February! I am so happy that I am able to channel my anxiety into a positive project as well as help raise awareness for anxiety and mental health!

My story was a personal story about how I convinced my parents to let me move to New York. Telling it out-loud was most difficult because I do not personally like talking about personal things in front of people I do not know. Writing it down felt as if the story was true; I felt like since it was written down, it now has more validity. When thinking about how to tell this story with computers, I really was unsure of what to do. To me, just seeing it written down on a computer screen felt technological enough. Then I came to the conclusion of making the story through gifs. Gifs influence the way people talk to one another. You can send someone a gif and they will understand what you mean through the context of the conversation.

This story may not make sense to anybody if they do not understand the pretext, but that is the whole point of computers. It simplifies communication, but only if people understand the way you are using it. No one understands the coding behind the websites we use, but people do because they created it and that’s what matters.

For this week’s blog post, I am choosing to respond to “I’m an Addict” and Other Sensemaking Devices: A Discourse Analysis of Self-Reflections on Lived Experience of Social Media.” By Katrin Tiidenberg, Annette Markham, Gabriel Pereira, Mads Rehder, Ramona Dremljuga. In the reading, it talks about how young people negotiate their own experience and existing discourses about social media. Social media addiction is a phrase sometimes used to refer to someone spending too much time on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other forms of social media so much so that it interferes with other aspect of daily life. For example, I find myself being addicted to social media because I’m always checking my Instagram or Twitter to discover the latest news. The authors stated “social media use is pathological and leads to psychological problems. “This discourse utilizes the above-mentioned addiction grand narrative, relying on the reified rhetorical elements of narcissism, FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) or vanity.” FOMO is an issue for everyone from middle schoolers to adults that spend too much time on social media. I think FOMO is like getting invited to a party from your friends and not showing up because you gotta go to your little cousin birthday party that you don’t like. People are afraid to miss out on stuff becuase it makes them feel uncool.

Work Citied

Sources: Tiidenberg, Katrin, et al. “‘Im an Addict’ and Other Sensemaking Devices.” Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Social Media & Society – #SMSociety17, 2017

Stories are shared among everyone. Everyone has a story to tell, a story can be important or it could be a friendly reminder of something that went wrong. But when it comes to writing a story on the computer it’s different because you have the option to add pictures, highlight some words or insert gifs and videos. I told my story about my cat when it attacked my brothers. This story has been talked about since it happened among everyone in my family. Although I was only two years old at that time I could imagine how terrible it was.

After completing each of the three stories assignments, I learned a better understanding about the importance of telling stories it connects back to orality, written and through technology. For the oral part, I told my story the way I remembered it and heard it from my mother. The written part, I was asking my mother and brothers about the story. Lastly, for the technological aspect of storytelling, I think adding gifs would be a great way to give the viewer’s attention and highlight certain elements in my story.

By far the most difficult process of turning a piece of literature into a serious of tweets, was deciding concisely which words to use, due to the 280 character count. Despite the original 400 word source material, it was very difficult to pick which words to cut and shape for the lower amount of space. I chose to discuss the setting, how it was told to me later in life, and why John Douglas is still relevant to me. I found myself using more relaxed and non-academic wording, trying to ‘tweet’ it like I was speaking the story out loud.

I think that the twitter link I provided is an extremely prevalent example of communication and computer technology. Twitter has become, politically and socially, more important in terms of the most recent information being available. Therefore, if I would want to tell many people, my followers, this story it makes it much easier. I also used a GIF to display an emotion my father had because it was easier to convey visually, rather than use a sentence. Overall, I used a much different style or writing for my tweets that I would describe as very conversational and relaxed.

https://twitter.com/Douglas199714

I normally like to talk a lot but when it came down to picking a story it was difficult. I ended up choosing a story that at first I thought had no big significance to me. When I said the story out loud I tried my best to just get to the point so it would be quick and short. When it came to the written part of the story, I then tried including more details and a background to my life that can sort of help you understand the story a little more. When it came to the digital part of the story it then pointed out 3 words that I repeated 7 times which was grandpa, grandparents and time. My reflection to the three parts storytelling is that although I kept telling my story there was still some changes in all 3. There are so many stories that we have that we have probably told a couple of times. We tell a story to make sure the point gets across but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is told the same way all the time. I think that it is almost impossible to tell a story the same way various times because either you missed some details or you forgot to mention something. I liked this small project a lot because I would’ve never realized this about telling a story.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=efa5c56cae99eeba7ed4772ad83227d3&view=Cirrus

What stuck out to me the most when I put my story into Voyant-tool was the words that were used the most. There were 3 words that I used 7 times which was grandparents, grandpa and time. This amazed me because I didn’t realize how often I used these words until it was put into Voyant-tool. These 3 words are significant to my story because this story was a time in my life that I shared with my grandparents that I will always remember. I didn’t realize the significance of these words during the other two parts of storytelling because these 3 words didn’t stick out to me until now.

Personally the hardest part of this project would have had to be choosing a story to tell out loud. We are constantly hearing stories, passing them down, and experiencing something new which later becomes a story. I originally told a story about my dog but it was hard for me to stick with it as I entered into part two of this project. Although I tell this story a lot, it was difficult to give insight on any written details, or keep one idea for the very fact I wasn’t there when the events took place. Most detail I did know was told to me afterwards with the gaps filled from the people that were there. My new story has also been told many times but it was a personal experience that I didn’t find as difficult to write down. It was actually nice to finally put this story on paper because it something I never really got to chew on, I tell it due to its unexpected, and strange qualities but while writing it I could finally fully understand the emotion behind it. When going into the final part, allowing the computer to visually display my work, I realized how bizarre this story actually is. I usually tell it in a humorous way because it’s all in the past but when looking at what the computer generated ironically there’s very little humor in it. This is something I would have never noticed if it wasn’t for computer functions like text mining.