The Truth about "Shameless" -
Poverty & Mental Illness in America
Media often manipulates information on TV which results in shows like "Shameless" to be overlooked as true. However, through research any information can be found.
BACKGROUND:
CAMPAIGN:
Shameless gives a decently accurate portrayal of families in poverty that deal with mental illness and addiction by the accounts of personal experience and statistics.
Three Genre Report
My campaign’s title is the Truth About “Shameless” – Poverty and Mental Illness in America. The idea of addiction is also correlated into it, however, mental illness was a bigger topic discussed in my research. Because I chose a very narrow subject to discuss my campaign is complex; the background of my campaign and what I’m actually campaigning spins off each other. The background of my campaign is: Media often manipulates information on TV which results in shows like “Shameless” to be overlooked as true. However, through research any information can be found. My actual campaign is: Shameless gives an accurate portrayal of families in poverty that deal with mental illness and addiction by the accounts of personal experience and statistics. The genres I decided to use to promote these messages were an info graphic, a Twitter account, and a Facebook group page. I decided to do an info graphic because it is appealing to look at and made it easy to give the real facts about poverty in America. The Twitter account was very effective because most fan bases reside through twitter accounts and I was able to follow and reach out to many “Shameless” fans. The Facebook page was made to get more of the serious information out there such as the real facts about poverty and mental illness in America. I was also able to write longer posts due to the unlimited characters. Shameless also has a wide range of ages watching, I do know some older people who watch it, therefore I would be able to reach out to those fans through Facebook.
In the info graphic, I tried to use pathos and logos. I used pathos in the little description before the statistics to get the audience to read more. Logos was used by writing the facts and statistics. In the Twitter account, I mainly used pathos and ethos. I used pathos by writing posts that were more personal and casual to relate to the audience. I used ethos by using sources and other posts to show my credibility of the topic. I also posted my works cited. In the Facebook page, I used all three. Although I didn’t used pathos as much, I did make some posts that were casual and used to evoke my audiences’ emotions. I used ethos and logos by posting facts from my research and my works cited.
The choices I made to transfer information from my Project #2 to Project #3 were to find the information that was most viable and important. I had to summarize a lot of my research to make it easy to read and in a format to fit the types of genres. I was mainly cutting down my information and adding pictures to it. I also took one of the video sources from my paper and just used the actual video to get my point across. For Twitter specifically, I had to add some personal and casual aspects to my information. To promote my genres, I reached out mainly to “Shameless” fans. I posted on my personal Twitter and Facebook accounts and even texted the people I know who watch the show. I followed a lot of Shameless fan bases and followed the people following those pages. I did a lot of promotion through my friends and my personal accounts.
To complete this project, I had to use a lot of my personal skills to get my genres out. I kept telling my friends about my page and had them look at certain posts and I direct messaged a lot of accounts and pages on Twitter and Facebook. I think this project was pretty effective because on my Twitter at least, I got a decent amount of followers who were truly interested in the information. I received likes and feedback from fan pages and my friends along with some follows. I think the delivery of the material was a good way to get my message out too. If I just linked my research paper out to the world I don’t think I would get many responses like I did. The information was easier to read and in pieces, not all at once, which made it easy to read a little and come back. The posts also had consistency so the message being spread wasn’t forgotten. It wasn’t a paper just read and never looked at again. When you follow a page, most of the time you don’t go through the effort to unfollow it, you just keep reading the posts even if you just scroll by you still see them.
The process for this project required to reach out to a lot of different people and I think it was more centered on the audience than anything else. If the message was spread to the wrong audience, it wouldn’t be effective or get the response it should. Meanwhile, the process for Project #2 was simply to research a question and state what you found. This project was definitely more difficult to put together than Project #2 because of the different factors to be aware of such as choosing the right genres, picking your audience, knowing when to post, knowing what to post, etc. Managing a social media account with a specific message requires a lot of maintenance and rules. You can not post anything without thinking how your followers will interpret it and do with that information. I think the Facebook group page was the hardest to keep up with. It was hard to get people to follow the page and care about it since on Facebook your feed consists of mainly people, not accounts. Many people I reached out to also didn’t care to respond or look at the page. The info graphic was also hard to promote because you have to do it through outside sources. I had to post the info graphic on my personal and campaign Twitters and Facebooks to get it attention and even then no one responded. Overall, I liked this project, however, because it made me think outside the box and find different ways to get information out there. It also showed me how stressful managing accounts with specific intentions and purposes are.