Facebook chat minefield

Communication this time round, yes, was substantially stronger. However, to this day, I still hate Facebook group chats. Sure, we are all able to communicate in one place, but going to work and coming home to 99+ unread messages? No thank you.

Arguably the chat was actually super helpful, and i’m guilty of sending multiple questions in the space of about ten minutes, it just meant that after not using my phone for a few hours, it was worth making a cup of tea, and settling down to read the pages, and pages, and pages, of messages.

In the last assessment, I wrote a post talking about what we could do as a group to improve our communication. One thing that we all put forward, was starting an actual Facebook group page, where we could post more long winded things, discuss times, dates, locations etc, without clogging up a tiny chat window. This came in super handy throughout the pre-production and production stages. During pre-production, we used the page to talk about props we needed, as well as nominating who would bring what. It was great having the Facebook page to come back to if we needed to check out anything, so we weren’t scrolling through hundreds of messages. During the production stage was when it became really helpful. Due to the fact that locations, to begin with were a bit up in there, and a bit messy, we posted regular updates on new locations that we scouted and booked. If we were ever in doubt, or unsure of anything, we could comment on the relevant post, instead of just referring to a past group chat message.

Throughout post-production, we did fall back into the habit of just going straight to the group chat, which worked fine to an extent, but many of us had put the chat on ‘do not disturb’, so often questions would be left unanswered for a while.

I think it was super helpful having the group Facebook page though, even if we didn’t utilise it as well as we possibly could have.

Unlike the Facebook page, the group chat often just became a friendly chat, where we talked about, and sent things that were completely irrelevant to the project. (Please see examples below! and ignore the group chat nicknames)

Very clearly, we were easily distracted on the group chat, but that didn’t stop us from getting the job done! Maybe we would have been better only having the Facebook page, however without the group chat, we never would have formed such a strong group bond!!

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