Keyrsten Knight

ENGL 2010-416-Waldron

Notebook #3

Topic: Homelessness

Notebook #3

(Notebook prompt)5i. Use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and/or Pinterest as a way to explore how people communicate messages/information about your issue. Try posting some information about your issue and then pose some questions to your audience. What happened? Explain why you think you received the answers/feedback that you received. Create a Wordle word cloud with all of the responses OR create a collage of the photographs and other information that was offered.

The social justice topic that I chose for this semester is homelessness. As this is a relatively broad subject, I have elected to focus on homelessness as it relates to mental illness and substance abuse, thus far. For this notebook entry, I spent a great deal of time searching through all of the social networking that I had access to. I looked through Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, I even opened an account with Twitter for this assignment. I was pleased to find that there were various pages regarding homelessness and other pages and posts regarding mental illness and substance abuse, however I was extremely surprised that there was not more information regarding the connection between them.

I elected to do this assignment a little different the the prompt suggested. I was not really interested in creating my own post to get other people's input. Instead, I chose to review posts that other people created and review the comments that they received because I would like to get the ideas and responses from people who actually care about this topic. Most of the pages I did find focused mainly on the movement to end homelessness. Though this is a satisfying topic, it would open a whole new door to research. To avoid straying from my main topic, I tried to focus on the photos, posts, and images that pertained strictly to homelessness, reasons for homelessness, the affects that it has on people as individuals, and the affects that it has on the public and society.

There were several images on Instagram that caught my attention (shown on page #2). Some received short responses, however one image in particular drew in many lengthy comments discussing the issue at hand. I have shown a few of these in my photo collage. Although this is not a valuable source for reliable.