This post is a proposal for my digital literacies project.
I have chosen to study the Facebook group, "Sowerby and Luff's Fully Optimised Social Media Network." This Facebook group is a gathering ground for the fans of British comedy duo Brian Luff and Georgina Sowerby. Luff and Sowerby perform comedic news parody podcasts and perform live comedy. The group has a current roster of 904 global members, with less than a quarter of the members participating in active discussion. Ascertaining the ages and genders of the members of this group is difficult, due in part to the increased privacy measures enacted by Facebook for their patrons.
The general interest would seem to be comedy and especially unusual news stories. These stories encompassed strange happenings in the world and are often centered around animals: in the past they have covered stories such as Panda Porn (pornographic films created by a Chinese zoo to increase the libido of Pandas). These humorous and odd articles often create a lot of discussion in the Facebook group. It will be my endeavor over the course of this project to examine the interplay between the Facebook Group and the Podcast (Brian and Georgina's Fat Chance) and see the relationship between the post in the Facebook Group and the Podcast: do the post in the Facebook group simply reply to the podcast or create new discourse that is incorporated into the podcast.
As a long time fan of Sowerby and Luff, though I have somewhat drifted away from their projects, and someone who used to occasionally participate in their show, their group interests me because at the surface level it seems like a microcosm of Facebook: the group participants seem to post the same type of items, links, photos, videos, to the group that one would expect to see on their newsfeed, only they deal specifically with bizarre items and happenings. Sowerby and Luff's group is an interesting phenomenon because it takes the idea of comical news stories and shares it with a global audience.
I have chosen to study the Facebook group, "Sowerby and Luff's Fully Optimised Social Media Network." This Facebook group is a gathering ground for the fans of British comedy duo Brian Luff and Georgina Sowerby. Luff and Sowerby perform comedic news parody podcasts and perform live comedy. The group has a current roster of 904 global members, with less than a quarter of the members participating in active discussion. Ascertaining the ages and genders of the members of this group is difficult, due in part to the increased privacy measures enacted by Facebook for their patrons.
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| Brian Luff and Georgina Sowerby |
As a long time fan of Sowerby and Luff, though I have somewhat drifted away from their projects, and someone who used to occasionally participate in their show, their group interests me because at the surface level it seems like a microcosm of Facebook: the group participants seem to post the same type of items, links, photos, videos, to the group that one would expect to see on their newsfeed, only they deal specifically with bizarre items and happenings. Sowerby and Luff's group is an interesting phenomenon because it takes the idea of comical news stories and shares it with a global audience.
There website is: http://www.sowerbyandluff.com
You can download their podcast from iTunes here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/comedy-365/id77811053?mt=2
