From my Facebook network I chose a group of 30 friends, some who were already mutual friends and some who were not. This was with the idea of trying to have a variety of responses (with people not already knowing one another), but also hoping the pre-existing relationships in the group between friends would mean that they would build on and collaborate with each other’s responses.
I asked this Facebook network the following question:
What is the best idea you can think of for a movie?
There were only two responses for this question, and no discussion amongst participants at all. It was a disappointing failure. I realised this question was too general and quite frankly my participants could not be bothered to respond.
I then came up with a second question which I hoped would be more specific.
If you could choose any cast members for your own movie, who would you choose?
This question was more successful than the first. The responses I gathered were a range of celebrities and movie stars. There was humorous discussion among participants, and responses were a mix of short paragraphs of text and occasional image links. But I couldn’t help thinking that no real intelligence was being created in this forum.
Using the same group of participants, I then modified my question to: “Excluding movie stars, who would you choose to star in your film and why?”
This provoked an interesting increase in responses and a different type of response. One respondent posted this video to the Facebook thread, with the comment: “this kid as lead male, and his bro can be director”.
This first video sparked the uploading of more videos, such as this one with the comment “made by the roommate of some dude tripping out, best character I’ve ever seen, I’d watch him for 2 hours plus”.
Another response was this video with the comment "she's my pick for head writer/producer for my movie, soooo cute".
It was interesting that because the question was raised in an online forum, Facebook, my respondents were more inclined to provide answers that were understood by an online community - evident in the flurry of ‘Youtube celebrities’ in the viral videos that were added to the thread. It was also interesting to see how it only took one viral video for many more of my participants to follow suit and produce a similar response. It was almost like a ‘peer pressure’, or ‘fitting in with the crowd’ situation.
Several more videos were uploaded and discussed socially amongst participants. Most of the discussion was along the lines of “that was heaps funny”. Participants expanded on ideas, such as sending links to other videos starring the ‘World of Warcraft Kid’. The thread had approximately 5 days of high activity between the 2nd and 7th of September. In this period there were a total of 34 responses, many of these were just comments on other participants’ posts though. After this, activity slowed immensely and eventually died off until nothing more was added to the thread as of the 11th of September.
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