DOCUMENTARY; VALIDATION

After our final feedback/tutorial session with Helen before our easter break (and filming) we spoke about the ideas of WHY teenagers use social media. We came up with a few ideas that i wanted to look into further and that will defiantly create some talking points for our documentary.

1) Validation
- Do teens use social media for validation?
- And if so in what form?

Originally social media was created as a means of communication, for family and old friends to be able to communicate and in a way share their lives together, sharing and exploring old memories. However, this has changed now because people, especially teenagers use social media as a means of validation. Instead teenagers now use social media as a means to compete and validate things within life. The biggest example of this that i can think of is snapchat and streaks. Within snapchat you can have streaks with certain people if you snapchat everyday; this is validation of friendship. Having a snapchat streak with someone (which involves snap chatting them everyday) is seen as a validation of friendship; almost like someone appears better friends with someone if they have snapchat streaks.

2) Glorification                                        Does social media mean a glorification for life?

Living life through social media is something ever teen is prone to see. There is a belief that social media evokes competition between teens, and with social media they can glorify their life, post pictures and statuses/tweets that make their life appear a lot more exciting than it actually is. Teens can post pictures of certain things just to compete with their peers as to who has the better and most exciting life.


3) Narcissism 

Teens have started to loose sight of their life, they have started to live it through a mobile phone instead of enjoying life for what it really is. The biggest example that we have found of this is the idea that of people videoing concerts, instead of enjoying and being in the moment right there and then, teens film it through the screen to view over and over again. Furthermore this then begs the question, do they film so they can physically watch again? or do they just film for their own narcassistic value - to show their friends and family to prove they were there.

In the Project
These ides of validation, glorification and narcassism is something we would defiantly like to explore in our documentary. In the current hope of finding our expert we really want too look into the psychology behind teens and social media; how it can effect them in both positive and negative aspects - and if it will affect them in their later life. In essence we would like to ask Jake these questions and about whether he experienced this loss of validation during his detox.