Citizen Journalism

For this project, I struggled to come up with an idea because I didn’t have a lot of time over these past two days to find an event occurring somewhere on campus. But, I thought of the idea of filming the “public” laundry in soles hall because one of my pet peeves occurs here. I live in soles hall and there is a large laundry room for off campus housing and the courts to utilize the laundry room, but this causes a high volume of traffic. Not necessarily on a Monday or Tuesday night but Saturday and all of Sunday becomes a bad time to want to do laundry. One of the pet peeves that happens is that people put their laundry in and then leave it there for hours on end, taking up machines that could be used. This behavior leads people to have to move the clothing from the machine to the dryer or to leave the clothes out on the counter. This becomes a problem when people start randomly moving clothing and misplacing items and I end up with so many missing socks, (and at most I have been a minute late to come and pick it up or move to the next machine so people just assume.) It’s also an issue when people just throw your clothes into the dryer because I have a bunch of clothes that don’t go in the dryer so this is also an issue for me. So, I decided to film the laundry room to hopefully capture someone moving someone else’s laundry and dropping items, but like I said tonight was not a high volume night for laundry so there was nothing suspicious occurring,

As the citizen journalist, I felt kind of awkward standing in the laundry room filming random people doing their laundry, because they weren’t doing anything wrong and its not typically something you see in that room. As soon as I started filming someone walked in and put their clothing into the washer and could tell I was filming but we didn’t know each other so it was definitely uncomfortable for the both of us. I wonder what would have happened if someone did come in and move someone else’s laundry while I was in there filming, if they would continue to do so or maybe choose not to because of the camera. I waited around to see if anyone else would come in but there were multiple washers and dryers open, so there would be no need to touch other peoples stuff.