SOCS 325 Week 8 Collaborative Group Project Discussion - graded an A+

SOCS 325 Week 8 Collaborative Group Project Discussion A Twitter live chat is not an event I ever thought that I would have to host in my lifetime. However, I feel a s though I am better for the experience and have come out all the more knowledgeable for executing it. With that being said, here is my reflection of hosting my Twitter live chat. To begin, I absolutely considered this chat a successful venture. I noticed that I, nor anyone else, was receiving much feedback from fellow classmates when advertising our upcoming Twitter live chats. Therefore, I went as far as to enlist my own help in order to discuss the topic. I asked several friends, family members, and classmates from my other class to attend. Of them, three appeared for the duration of my Twitter live chat. While there were few of us, we got into a thriving conversation about solar energy and its various uses. In fact, two of the tweets in the conversation were retweeted by a solar company and solar advocacy group. Thus, I accomplished my mission of spreading awareness of the use of solar energy through my Twitter live chat. Next time though, I would push a little harder to get more people into the discussion. I would possibly even lengthen the discussion timeframe to a full day in order to encourage maximum participation regardless of time zone. While planning the chat, I found it difficult to nail down a topic that wasn’t already beaten into submission. Solar energy is an easy topic that everyone uses; however, the application and functionality of solar energy beyond the realm of solar panels is a rarely discussed topic. That is exactly why I chose the “#letthesunlight” tag, in order to discuss the many different ways that the sunlight can work for us. During the chat, the only major frustration that I seemed to encounter was the difficulty behind keeping track of, and responding to, each individual tweeting. Even with just the four of us having a discussion, it proved very difficult to determine when and if someone was going to reply. There is a lack of conversational etiquette because you are not face to face with those you are discussing the topic with. Therefore, anyone can chime in with a thought or idea at any given time, sometimes jumbling up the conversation. This is where the hashtag came into play. Twitter is different from other social media as the primary form of back and forth communication is a hashtag. I kept track of each tweet in the conversation by constantly searching the hashtag. One has to considered disruptors such as time zones, work schedules, lull in internet connection, or too many people responding at once. I learned that solar power is an answer to a renewable energy source; however, it too still has some kinks to work out. The biggest of which is the use of nonrenewable resources required to make the solar panels operate properly. The action required to fix this would be more research into the inner workings of solar power. Or, the searching for another means of operation through the use of completely renewable resources. The material we discussed during the Twitter live chat goes directly back to the central meaning of the text. Environmental sociology is the study of the interactions between societies and their natural environment. My discussion was based on how society can use its natural environment, the sun, to produce power and sustainability for the society. Thus, utilizing the natural environment to not only help society, but helping to keep the environment safe and sustainable as well. In conclusion, I actually had fun creating a campaign to raise awareness for the use of solar power. All too often society takes the environment for granted and all it does is cause further damage to both parties. I enjoyed being able to learn the importance of the interactions between environment and society.