I had so much fun with this project, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t have its challenges. We began by constructing a realistic figure that we all saw in our day-to-day life. Social media influencers seemed do be so relevant to each of us, so we started building our persona around digital marketing through Instagram. I learned that you can buy followers, (and get scammed while doing it) and market yourself as a business in order to promote posts.
When we began the wiki, I decided that it would be smart to model it off of someone who made their own living off of social media. Jenna Marbles, who was one of my favorite you tubers growing up, was a clear inspiration. Her page was short, informative, and best of all, easy to imitate. Creating sources may have been the most difficult part. I had to convert my old Tumblr blog into a fake magazine, taking the time to edit everything into as neat a site as possible, and we had to slide Payton into some real life people in order to make her seem real. So, we edited real life model Pyper America’s wiki to give Payton a famous relative. We even went so far as to add her to the same modeling agency. There seemed to be so many details we had to cover, from why she had almost no posts on her Instagram, to how she gets seen in public.
The hardest part of this assignment was actually building the wiki page. That website is not user friendly. Editing was a crazy mix of coding, typing and copy-and-pasting from our outline into the editor and then reworking it again and again. It took about 3 hours just to figure out how to do the biography side bar. If I had more time, I would fully flush out our sources. I would create more, find more ways to make Payton real, and just code the crap out of that wiki page.
