I've been a follower of What Was Breakfast ever since the project's creator Alan Epstein approached me in the streets for a quick interview about my breakfast. Before the times of COVID-19 and shelter-in-place orders, Alan walked up to people in the streets and asked them what they had for breakfast, and took their photo, and posted it along with the breakfast interview transcript on his Instagram.
As soon as COVID-19 became more serious in Chicago, with people being asked to practice social distancing, I noticed that Alan was changing up his content-gathering process in response. Alan was kind enough to share his time and jump on a call with me, and this time we switched roles where I got to ask him a few questions about his project, and got to know him a bit better.
With restaurants shutting down and people being asked to stay at home, Alan found himself asking, "If I had to telecommute that project, what would that look like?" He decided to ask people to DM him pics of their breakfast, and he would send them his phone number, and interview them through the call. He would then post the pics of their breakfast on Instagram, along with a snippet from the transcript of their call. He called it the Breakfast in Quarantine series.
I asked Alan how his followers' engagement with new content has changed before and during the pandemic. And what struck me the most about his response wasn't the change in how his followers engaged with him, but with the change in how he felt connected to his followers. He says:
"Instagram is a very visual medium. What I was doing before was trying to capture people's attention with people's portrait... and capture the vibe, feel, and look of a person via the photography. And the breakfast was your window into the person's life in a small way. You kind of get to know somebody, but you also kind of don't, and I really liked the ambiguity of that, at least in this project's previous form.
Now I feel like I'm getting to know people much more because on the street, I would have a one-to-two-minute interaction. I ask you a bunch of questions really quick, and then I'm out.
But now because we're all not having to go anywhere, and we're just on the phone, these conversations just get drawn out much longer. And I'm talking to people for anywhere between five and fifteen minutes. It always starts with the food but it can kind of go wherever and we have the time to let it expand. So I think I'm getting to know people more, and I think maybe people are getting to know me more."
With the conversations getting longer, he doesn't have the time to transcribe them in full. So he picks out snippets for Instagram, and posts the interviews in full on his podcast.
As for the difference in responses pre- and during quarantine, he explains, "I've gotten much less engagement numerically [based on likes], but the amount of people who say 'Thank you for doing what you're doing,' sending me DMs, and talking to me on the phone... the actual human interaction went through the roof."
Alan mentioned Studs Terkel, a Chicagoan author who was famous for audio documentaries, where he'd talk to regular people and transcribe those conversations. "Maybe [the oral history] has been the part of [What Was Breakfast] that was most interesting to me, and the photos were the hook to get people to pay attention," says Alan. He feels like the process for his Breakfast in Quarantine series gives him "more of the direct form of the kind of stuff I always wanted to do -- more radio, conversational, audio." To sum it all up, he says, "It's been an interesting. accidental change."
Check out Part 1 in my series Virtual Connection during Social Distancing, and stay tuned for my next post on online communities.
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