You know the feeling of choosing that study-unit at the beginning of the semester, which you only know the bare minimum about, but you choose it because you need your 60ECTS.
Digital Literacies and Social Networking for Creatives was one of those, with the exception that it turned out to be one of the most fruitful study-units I have had in four years!
We had to:-
""Deliver a digitally-literate project which meets all four key criteria
- uses more than one social media "platform;
- targets an audience;
- is accessible outside the creative arts world; and
- demonstrates a strategic approach "’
Trying to come up with an idea is quite challenging, but my point of departure was the fact that if I need to use social media it has to be "social’, but ironically in today’s age we’ve come to be defined as the opposite of ’social’.
I didn’t want to just sit down in front of my laptop, design some posts, and then let social media do the rest. We have become so accustomed to the fact that our devices can do anything that going out of our comfort zone has become unusual. So in whatever I was up to do, I wanted to involve and interact with as much people as possible.
After days of brainstorming I came up with the idea of "Log Off’. But how could I create an offline community?
I believed that if people were to see something unusual around them they would look up from their phones and see what it is all about. My strategic plan was to use a blackboard (for which I also needed to rent an easel) as a source of interaction, with the aim of having passers-by actually write on the board.
My target audience was practically everyone who uses social media, from students at Junior College, Higher Secondary School and University to tourists roaming around the Upper Barrakka. I must say that tourists were really eager to write on this blackboard, it was somehow their way of expressing what they love about Malta on a tangible object rather than just posting it somewhere online.
I am also glad that Log Off served as a platform to raise more awareness on campus on disabilities. During the process of my project I was approached by two students who suggested to use Log Off as a way to raise awareness. Here’s what happened..
In this day and age we really need to start looking around us more and at our phones less, because we have forgotten how to interact with each other. We rarely give each other full attention because we are always on our phones. It is indeed a worrying fact that today we would rather communicate via text messages than face-to-face. We are also growing up with the idea that social media lets us present the self we want to be because we can edit, crop and retouch.
I don’t want to suggest that we should turn away from our smartphones or from social media, but on the contrary, I want my audience to understand the profound effects that social media has on us. If we can understand that we can approach social media differently, we might become more aware of its effects.
In conclusion, it was a fun learning experience from which I have learnt a lot more than I expected. I did not learn only about social media in general, but also about myself. I have also learnt how to film, edit and design posts thanks to this project!
