@profeshenglesh
a bot by Becca Gates, Han Choi, Riley Smith, Nicholas Mazegue
Makers’ Statement
Our bot is called jobs 4 engl majors and it is going to empower and encourage English majors by tweeting personable and supportive tweets about jobs for English majors.
The intended audience for our bot is someone who can relate to the following statement: “As an English major who is concerned about the future career market, I want various examples of jobs English majors have/had so I feel comfortable and confident in my major.” We believe this captures both the population of English majors at Cal Poly and beyond. The purpose of this bot is to supply encouragement and examples of post-English degree jobs to our fellow majors as we are often asked what comes after graduation with a degree in English. We want our users to be surprised by how many different jobs—of all types of industries—English majors have actually obtained. Also, we want them to be settled in the fact something is always out there for English majors because of the versatility of the degree. We wanted to set a tone that incorporates a little irony, relatability, and humor (the Twitter humor this bot identifies with is sometimes called “wholesome content,” usually characterized by good naturedness and respectfulness).
Since our target audience is almost exclusively made up of college students studying English, we can assume that they are regularly using twitter and therefore well versed in Twitter culture; therefore, we do not need to offer more explanation than what is provided in our bot’s description.
Audience
Platform
We set up the bot to act as though it were a comical and endearing Twitter user; in this way, the Twitter platform’s culture—and a specific subset of its user base—heavily shaped our bot’s persona and the creation process. The persona was based around this idea that a Twitter user tweets things quickly and off the top of their head. We are not giving in-depth descriptions of these English major jobs because the character limit of tweet would not allow for it, and our purpose is centered on encouraging English majors, rather than providing detailed information on these particular jobs.
To reinforce this “off the top” style, a few of our origin statements are "standalone" statements. With every tweet, there is a chance for the persona to shift or evolve so these "standalone" statements account for that shift and help solidify our bot better. Twitter makes the process of looking for quantifiable data (e.g. followers, likes, retweets) easier and helps us see how effective we have been at creative relatably enjoyable content.
Another aspect of the platform that our bot utilizes is the followers. Our bot only follows famous English majors. We feel this is a subtle way of showing English majors the potential their degree has. To showcase our following list, one of our “standalone” statements remarks that if our followers don’t feel encouraged quite yet, they can take a look at who we follow for a verified list of English degree-holding famous people. We believe this is a clever way to utilize our following list. Overall, the Twitter medium makes it easy to see if our goal is being reached and assisted us in our decisions regarding our bot’s personality.
Persona
The bot is supportive first and foremost. Our goal with this bot is to encourage our fellow English majors in the pursuit of their degrees. But, we also want to poke a little fun, so the bot has the opportunity to be sassy, dumb, silly, and repetitive. We also thought it would be relatable to have no capitalization in our bot in order to replicate common Twitter etiquette. These humorous characteristics are “sprinkled” into our bot’s potential statements because the focus will remain on support and encouragement. We believe our audience will enjoy our bot more if it doesn’t take itself super seriously, but still puts forth content that is both interesting and related to the reader’s life.
The profile picture and header we chose for our bot also greatly impacts it’s persona. We chose a image of John Henry Newman for both informative and comedic reasons. Newman wrote The Idea of a University, a work all four of us turn to when pondering the relevancy of a humanities degree. If, however, a viewer has no idea what John Henry Newman looks like, it appears as if a random Catholic Cardinal is tweeting motivational messages in your feed, which we find funny. Our header encompasses the annoying and persistent questions ignorant people seem to constantly ask English majors, but we can also laugh at ourselves. So, we made it ridiculous. Finally, our handle captures the silly spirit of our bot: “profeshenglesh.” changing the “i” to an “e” makes it fun and catchy.
Ethics
There are a few ethical concerns that we have taken into consideration involving representation and the idea of “successful” jobs. As we researched English majors of notoriety to follow, it seemed increasingly clear that most fell into a specific categorization: white. Not to mention, we found a lot of them to be men and few of them to be either queer, non-white, or both. This issue of representation pushed us to find more English majors or greater diverse backgrounds which was challenging but not impossible. Another philosophical problem we ran into was being careful to tailor our language and statements to reflect the idea that success is not a particular job or income bracket. We created this bot to show that successful jobs can look like anything that makes one feel fulfilled and accomplished. We were mindful of finding a wide array of occupations to showcase the diverse application of an English major while being careful not to pass judgements on any line of work to support the idea that none are superior or inferior to the others.