Books On the Subway, Project Overview
Idea:
I had first come up with the idea for Books On the Subway after a morning commute. Peeking over at the woman who was sitting beside me, I was curious to what it was she was reading. This, of course was not the first time I had done this, and remembering conversations I had had with friends in the past, I knew I wasn’t the only one, for whatever reason, curious to see what a fellow New York commuter was reading.
Proposal:
Though our initial submission was a bit more complex than our actual work, the original proposal was thorough enough to allow for ease when carrying out the project. It was as follows:
For the purpose of the project, Dorry and I will travel on the L, the Green Line, and the Red Line, and photograph and interview those we find reading on the train. Our intention is also to keep an eye out for readers during our morning commutes, and note any changes in numbers of those reading, as well as reading material.
We will be looking for riders of the subway who are reading during their commute. When spotted, we will photograph them from a distance, capturing a clear moment while they are reading, and then confront them so to ask a series of questions about what they are doing – some of the information obtained will appear on the blog, while the rest will be for our own purposes. After the interview, we will take a final photograph (if they are willing) with their reading material.
Our interview questions will be as follows:
What book are you reading?
Would you recommend it?
Why or why not?
What do you prefer reading your material on and why?
Do you read on the subway often? Why or why not?
Do you read more during your morning or afternoon commute and why (if there is a difference)?
And where are you headed?
The information we gather from our interview will appear on the blog as follows:
Subway Line: (L; 4/5/6; 1/2/3)
Time: (4pm)
Title: (Name of reading material)
Medium of Choice: (book, tablet, newspaper/magazine, etc)
Worth the Read?: (Yes/No), Because…
Final Destination: (Home, dinner, etc)
In addition, we plan to post flyers in and around the New School campus, along Union Square – as there is a lot of train traffic around that area, as well as on the train platforms, in efforts to promote the site and give subway riders an opportunity to participate by submitting their own encounters with subway readers to our site’s email address (booksonthesubway@gmail.com). Dorry mentioned she would use Adobe Illustrator to create some flyers that we would use for this aspect of the project. We will create a twitter account, as well as a facebook page and promote our site using the networking opportunities offered by each medium.
What may be an additional way to promote the blog is to give the person we interview a slip of paper with our project’s information so they can check out the site, and potentially show others their featured post. I created an example of what we could use during our excursion.
After we begin to get posts (hopefully) on our site, we will look at our own information and the information submitted and based on the collected data begin to make observations. For example, determine: whether there is an overall preference to reading during the morning commute or during travel in the afternoon, if there exists is a specific genre or topic that is typically read by travelers on a certain line, a trend in how the material is read (book or tablet for example) within the line itself and also in comparison to others, amongst other details.
Field Work:
For the Books on the Subway project, Dorry and I worked on what quickly became a fun interactive venture. After traveling together and discussing the project further, Dorry and I realized that our intent for the project was no longer collecting data, but rather creating a network where individuals could interact through the mutual interest in literature of all types. During this excursion, we decided to remove the interview element from the project and simply get a photograph of the reader during the act, and the title/author of the reading material. This was decided, as we believed that an elaborate interview that would be posted along with the photograph on our site, could potentially scare away contributors, who would likely be unwilling to go to such measures to submit to a site. For a more accessible setting, we simply used the tag lines: reading material, subway line, and – what was later added in efforts to further engage with our audience – our recommendation, which was given a score out of 5 stars and generally based on the materials overall popularity, via amazon, wikipedia. In addition, we liked the material to a site which would our audience with more information to the reading itself.
During the same morning, we posted several flyers around the Union Square area in efforts to promote the site. While we did not pass out slips of paper with our tumblr site, as we felt that the best way to gather potential followers and contributors would be through efforts made within the digital world. Creating a twitter account, @booksonsubway, as well as a Facebook page, and connecting each medium to our tumblr, we hoped to bring traffic into our site.
Response/Reaction:
Overall, Dorry and I feel very good about the project’s outcome. In Jodi Dean’s Blog Theory, Dean writes, “’Blogipelago,’ like archipelago, reminds us of separateness, disconnection, and the
immense effort it can take to move from one island or network to another. It incites us
to attend to the variety of uses, engagements, performances, and intensities blogging
contributes and circulates.” (page 38). Our blog was a very specific environment that appealed to writers, bibliophiles, and New Yorkers. Using this ideology as the foundation to our project, we hoped to create a fun environment where people would want to visit and contribute on a daily basis. On our Twitter, people were attracted to certain hashtags, or the links that we posted back to our Tumblr. I would tweet trending topics on Twitter as well as ask questions about book preferences to our followers. In Alice Marwicks, “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience,” New Media and Society, she notes how “every participant in a communicative act has an imagined audience. Audiences are not discrete; when we talk, we think we are speaking only to the people in front of us or on the other end of the telephone, but this is in many ways a fantasy. (page 7). Just as the people who we snatched pictures of on the subway did not know they had an audience, whenever I tweeted I was busy imagining a “fantasy” audience who might or might not be aware of me. Illustrating a juxtaposition of imagining a bigger community than what you might actually have.
While trying to disseminate information on the Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr it felt like shooting a gun in the dark. You never knew if you made a mark, if a person actual looked at our blog, followed us on Twitter or Liked us on Facebook. There is also a big difference between the people who might look at our blog to the people who participate in them. While trying to navigate the “blogipelago” and different social networks I came to realize that
“the world is also a dynamic effect of our interventions into it – and we know this. Hence, we know we impact the world, but we don’t know exactly how. Neither do nor can we know with any certainty the ways that our current practices produce some futures while excluding others. We just know that there will be consequences and side-effects that we have not foreseen” ( Dean 10-11).
Currently, our twitter has 151 followers – which we were very excited about and it continues to grow. People have been sending Messages, suggesting books, thanking us for the follow and responding to our tweets. Our Facebook page, still unfortunately, has 7 Likes, and our tumblr page itself now has 21 followers with over 15 notes on our posts. In efforts to gain more followers on twitter, Dorry and I would consistently tweet throughout the course of the project as well as follow a number of twitter accounts that could be associated with our own in terms of topic. This proved to be successful as we went from having 38 followers to triple the amount in only 5 days. We also received 2 submissions to our gmail account, booksonthesubway@gmail.com, which we then posted to our site.
Twitter Profile:
Facebook Profile:
Tumblr Blog:
Tumblr Activity:
What is perhaps the most interesting element to our entire project is that of private and public space. The subway, which is technically a public area, can in reality be considered a private space given its riders interactions, or lack there of. The attention we did receive, if anything, reveals human’s natural desire to connect, interact, and so on, with one another despite the general appearance of having no interest.
mdeseriis are discussing. 
Mediated Subjectivity 
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