Shannon Seaman

The main goal of my campaign, “Self-Driving Cars: The Future of Driving”, was to eliminate negative public opinion about self-driving cars. This relatively new form of technology seems to have a negative connotation with the majority of the public, whether it be due to the media portraying it in a negative light, safety concerns, refusal to deviate from status quo, etc. Through the research conducted in Project #2, I learned that self-driving cars have both positive and negative implications, however, the benefits outweigh the costs. These cars can improve society in numerous ways, affecting almost every aspect of life: the environment, economy, travel/car-ownership, infrastructure, and daily activity. I made it my mission to share these advancements and promote the future of self-driving cars for the betterment of society.

The three genres I composed include the following: an article, a video, and a social media account. My first genre was an article made through BuzzFeed, an online website. BuzzFeed articles are typically humorous and contain memes, gifs, or quizzes. By creating this type of article, I deviated from the serious tone of self-driving cars. I felt that BuzzFeed has mostly a young teen to young adult audience, although some exceptions exist. I wanted to persuade this demographic through pathos using information relevant to them. I explained everyday issues, such as getting stuck in traffic, paying a great deal of money for car insurance, and road rage.. I used a wide variety of memes and a comical tone in order to explain how self-driving cars can alleviate these issues. I felt that memes are typical of popular culture and believed that this was the best way to convey my message to this younger audience. I used a simple bullet-point layout of ten main points so that it was easy to read. The completed article was posted on the BuzzFeed website on April 8, 2017 , and was promoted by posting a link to it on my Twitter multiple times over a period of 2 weeks. I found that each time I tweeted the BuzzFeed link, the number of views on the article increased. I found this genre to be pretty successful as it received a total of 28 views.

My second genre, a video, was made using the video-editing app, iMovie. Self-driving cars have a very large audience as many people operate cars everyday, and thus, have a reason to be interested in this topic. I felt a visual/audio mode was a great way to appeal to this large audience. So many people love to watch movies and videos and be visually entertained. Every decision I made in creating this video was done in order to make self-driving cars appear simply awesome! I chose background music with cool, electric upbeats. Downloaded from iTunes, I used the following songs: “Sail” (Unlimited Gravity Remix) by Awolnation, “Go Fck Yourself” by Two Feet, and “Galuchat” by Gui Boratto. The video includes clips from various YouTube videos from clips from WIRED, Veritasium, and AT&T all pieced together, rearranged, and slowed/sped up. I edited it further by increasing the saturation and making the hue blue in color in attempt to enhance its quality. The first scene starts off with a car crash that takes place with manual cars. Here, I feature a voice-over (from my friend), which explains how humans get distracted, and thus, are subject to car accidents. The second scene has a brief fact about how most car crashes are attributed to human error. The third scene is of self-driving cars in various contexts, well,…being awesome. The final result was uploaded on YouTube on April 8th, 2017 and was promoted by posting it on my Twitter. It received 12 views, but no likes or comments. I tweeted the video multiple times spread out over time for even greater exposure.  

My social media account, Twitter, was the main way I promoted my campaign and other two genres. It went live on April 8th, 2017. My audience was broad including those who operate a car and those interested in the future of technology. Therefore, I followed an array of diverse people, from intellectuals in Silicon Valley, to everyday mothers, totaling 289 people. I preferred Twitter to other social media websites because Twitter has become increasingly popular and it was very easy to find the right people to follow. I got a total of 53 people to follow me back. My profile picture contains the image of a beautiful sky and city road at night. My wallpaper is a road lined with bright, blue lights. I wanted the images to be futuristic and attractive. Through many retweets and original tweets (totaling 57 tweets) I used pathos to appeal to my audience’s desires. I retweeted/tweeted articles, videos, pictures, polls, and factual evidence in favor of self-driving cars. I used #handsfree as my campaign hash-tag. This was posted in my biography as well as on the majority of my original tweets or quote tweets. In addition, I hash-tagged #self-drivingcars, #self-driving, #progress, #autonomous on numerous of my tweets so that they could be found on the discover/popular page when searched for. I also gave a shout-out to Oliver Cameron, the Udacity Vice President I interviewed in Project #2. I tweeted at (@) him to congratulate him on his recent accomplishment of announcing his leading role in developing Voyage, a new self-driving taxi service. In return, he favorited my tweet. I received 3 direct messages from companies/individuals. One of them asked me if I was interested in them helping me “raise an investment to grow my company”. It is due to these numerous interactions that I consider Twitter to be my most successful genre.

The composition process for Project #3 was much different than Project #2 for a variety of reasons. Project #2 required a great deal of research from different sources in order to develop a well-written, organized essay. It was simple. Find the facts, deliver the facts. Show both sides of the argument. Project #3, on the other hand, not only required a point of view, but also called for important decisions to be made. I had to take into account which colors, sounds, positioning’s, etc. to apply to my genres that would best fit my message. I even had to consider the time of day I was promoting my genres. I found that my older audience best responded when they most likely got off of work, around 5:00 pm. From changing from Project #2 to Project #3, I decided to broaden my focus and shift from only focusing on the economy to focusing on other important issues. This is because the public not only cares about the economy, but they also care about the environment, traffic/accident reduction, their daily activity, and most importantly, safety. After practicing how to recognize and differentiate genres in class, I had to physically create them myself. I truly enjoyed this process. The most challenging part of Project #2 was finding and incorporating scholarly sources that established my credibility. The most challenging part of Project #3 was keeping up with promotion. I felt that in order to properly gain a following and get my message out there, I had to engage with my audience every single day and at specific times throughout the day. This was often time consuming; it almost felt like a part-time job. If I could give advice to myself before beginning Project #2 to make Project #3 easier, it would be to learn more about how these cars operate. I know the basics, but by having an even deeper knowledge I could have been able to explain the logics behind the technology and exactly how these cars are safer.