Most people think of MIT as a collection of nerds and social outcasts who just happen to be really smart. For our final project, we would like to challenge those stereotypes and see how we can change the perceptions that high school and college students have about MIT.
We’ve created a short 8-minute video about life at MIT and how MIT does not fit the stereotypes that most people have about it, featuring about a dozen interviewees representing a wide range of majors, residences, and years. Every person interviewed was asked the following questions:
- What stereotypes do your friends have about MIT?
- What stereotypes did you have before you arrived here?
- How have these stereotypes changed since you’ve arrived here?
All interviews were recorded and then edited so that the answers to these three questions were grouped together. We note that there was a very negative interview from a graduate student in Burton-Conner that clashed completely with the content of the other interviews; his interview material was not included in the video.
For the second part of the project, we will track the changes in opinion that our target audience has about MIT over the course of 3 to 4 weeks. To take advantage of what Yochai Benkler termed “networked communication”, we plan to post the video on Google Video and YouTube and then encourage as many people to watch and respond to the video as possible by using message boards and emails. The prospective forums include College Confidential, a large discussion site with many thousands of prospective applicants crawling its boards. Determining how well our video does here will be based upon the peer responses to our posts- specifically, we are looking for any perspective changes in prospective applicants. We’ve created a Facebook group for the video as well, specifically to have our friends and networks take a look. Facebook’s format is especially conducive to recording critique and opinions. As more potential forums come to our attention, we may post to more sites, all of which we plan to monitor. We next plan to interview several high school students about their notions about MIT, show them the video, and see what new opinions they have. The more direct responses from these high school students will remove the network media and give us a gauge of reactions to our video taken out of the Internet, to serve as a sort of “control”. This control will give us a clearer idea of what effects our video might have, as the entire project is based upon how well our video will be recieved.
A video like this created a decade ago would have been created only by MIT in an effort to recruit students, very much representative of a “hub-and-spoke architecture”. By distributing the video from our own connections, we plan to test “the multidirectional connections… in the network information economy” in an easily measurable manner that can also help to improve MIT’s image.
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