I have to say, I think this was my favorite project of the semester. It allowed me to really dive deep into a topic I love which is music. I have always been a fan of pop music, but this allowed me to dive deeper into the artists I love and the news that is happening almost constantly in the industry. Honestly, I did not require a lot of research because it was already a topic I was passionate about.
My intention was to curate the latest news in pop music, which I was successful at. However, it was difficult to simply report on one thing. I curated posts not just about new music being released, but also news about the artists who create them. Since we as a society see musicians as celebrities, it was hard to focus on one aspect of the music industry without ignoring another.
I think being the curator was my favorite part of this immersion. The consumer part was relatively short and sweet, as I was simply finding my favorite pop artists and following their Twitter accounts. However, when it came to curating their tweets, I found that I had to follow more trade press venues such as Billboard, Rolling Stone, and Variety, in order to see more of the news. Many of the artists I enjoy listening to use their Twitter’s for more personal purposes, and therefore I didn’t have a ton to work with. For example, I followed Ariana Grande in the hopes of seeing exciting news about her upcoming work or performances, but instead was faced with pictures of her many dogs.
After I curated a lot of posts via Twitter, Youtube and Facebook, I began to write my own posts about popular music. In one I was able to explore the positive things that makes popular music so attractive to the everyday person. In another post I created a playlist of the best popular music of the last 10 years. All of this allowed me to really explore my creativity. I found it difficult to find an event to live tweet, but then I struck gold when the #INTHEHEIGHTSMOVIE hashtag began trending worldwide. “In The Heights” is not only a favorite music of mine, but it is a pop/hip-hop musical with a latin feel that falls directly under my immersion into popular music. Live tweeting this allowed me to even incorporate a bit of information about Broadway and the film industry because the pop musical was being adapted into a movie and the teaser trailer had just hit the internet. That being said, verified users and normal people like you and me alike were talking about it live and therefore provided me with a lot to talk about. My twitter handle to view my live tweets is @JuliaMonteleon1.
According to “Newsroom Curators and Independent Storytellers: Content Curation as a New Form of Journalism” the function of a curator is “basically someone who takes an inordinate mass of material, and turns chaos into order, or in more recent slang, turns ‘noise into signal.'” I found that simply by making choices about the direction I wanted to go with this project, I was becoming like the captain of a ship, directing it where to go. I like the comparison that this article in particular made about curators being like human filters when it comes to social media and world news. With a constant influx of stories from different sources, it can be easy for the story itself to be lost in translation. In my case there was a lot of white noise about artist’s lives that I didn’t really care to use. I didn’t want to focus on their celebrity, I wanted to focus on their music, and the mark they are leaving on the world. In this way I was able to curate information that made my blog a place for pop music news, rather than a tabloid for celebrity news.
As for “My 13 Golden Rules of Twitter,” I found that there were some rules that I think I could have followed better if I had done this over a semester long period of time. The rules that involve creating relationships and gaining reciprocity take time, and I don’t believe I had the kind of time to develop relationships with people who were interested in my topic. The other problem with this is that for my topic many of the people involved are verified users with so much celebrity that it would be difficult to get them to engage in conversation with me. For example, I could not expect Lin Manuel Miranda to tweet me back when I live tweeted the release of the teaser trailer for “In The Heights.” However, I did find that when I responded to someone else’s tweet, or retweeted something with a comment, I did receive a few likes from people. Hashtags also drew attention to what I was tweeting.
Julia's Popular Music Blog 