To be honest, going into Module 2, I had no idea what to expect. My mind was all over the place coming out of the animated GIFs Module and starting over brand new. I scrolled through the Modules page of the Digital Studies webpage and began looking for a new module. I saw that there were a couple of new modules, such as Selfie and Trolling. I thought that those could be interesting, but I thought that a lot of people would want to do those modules, so i decided not to. I kept scrolling until finally I found the Labor module. While reading the instructional information on the Labor page, I started to get interested. I thought it would be cool to take a step back and try to be a bit more observant. I was very intrigued by the thought of finding out the jobs behind our social media networks.
My basic plan for this module was to do a little research and find the jobs that go on behind the scenes of the popular social media platforms. When i joined the group, I don’t think there was anyone from our section in the slack channel. I thought to myself, “This might be interesting.” SO i started looking things up, but I was looking in all the wrong alleys. The next day we had class Danielle told me that she joined the module and that she had a vision for what she wanted to do for the channel as well. We both went back to doing our individual research in order to bring them together in a convergence of ideas and information that convey what we thought was unique and important about the module.
When I went to do my research the second time I came across a website that I thought would be very beneficial to our work. It was called vault, or something like that. It had job listings, a history, basically everything that I thought I needed. So I took my time to read and gather what I thought would be good information for the presentation. The next day in class, Mark joined our module and Danielle said that she had found all of her materials and was ready to work on the presentation. I said that I had some information too, but I had no idea it would be wrong. After putting my info on the presentation it occurred to me that the jobs that i found weren’t actually the behind the scenes job. They were jobs specific to a non social media network company. I immediately went to look for jobs from both Twitter and Facebook and that’s where I got my final information from.
The jobs I found were, Software Engineer, Network Operations Engineer, Country Data Scientist, Developer Support Engineer, Quantitative Researcher, and Solutions Architect. Each of these jobs dealt with the behind the scenes building and appearance in some way, shape, or form. It was interesting to me how easy it was to find the information once I started thinking correctly. To be completely honest, I am still very interested in what happens with the social media workers on a deeper level than what our group found. I want to see how the next group will expand the field.
