Project Case Statement: This project focuses on absence of social media in order to better conceptualize personhood.
Project Problem Statement: Social media has supplied us with new possibilities for constructing our identities in the upcoming technological age. Will taking away social media lead to constructing a new identity or will it create a hybridization of the new and old technology.
Experiment Statement: Over the course of the term, the goal for this project is to find the degree that social media has influenced our self-concept, social life, life-style, and productiveness in our identities.
Conclusion: Many people believe that the use of social media is imperative for our generation but more than anything we found it a distraction in our daily lives. In fact after our two weeks we haven’t felt the need to constantly check social media sites, unlike before hand. We did find that the hardest part was not being able to use our phone for phone calls and texts. Not having a phone is unheard of in our current society, so going without a phone was a major handicap in socializing; in fact we would even say that not having a phone is problematic in our current culture. Overall though, we found that the different aspects of our character weren’t affected by this technology making it not essential in our own identity. In other words, social media seemed to have no effect our own identities.
A group of five students set out to discover more about themselves by abstaining from social media for two weeks. The group interviewed friends and kept journals to document their findings.