Overview
For this project, you will curate artifacts from your social media history into a single exhibit. Sift through your social media artifacts (such as Facebook posts, Instagram images, YouTube videos, Tumblr blogs, Pinterest pages and pins) and select a stream of 10-15 artifacts to put on exhibit. For every artifact you include, write anywhere from 2-3 sentences to a full paragraph providing context. Publish your exhibit on the platform of your choice. Good options include: Medium, a WordPress page, Prezi, or Storify. Storify is a particularly good option if you would like to simplify and streamline the aggregation of your social media artifacts and worry less about embedding code.
Some questions to consider when narrating your story:
- Consider the story you’d like to tell about yourself. Who are you and what kind of person do you strive to be? Think about the person you would like to be 10 or 25 years from now. Every element of your story should attempt to support the growth of that person. Why is this media artifact significant to your story? Consider its role in your development of an online persona.
- Perform an analysis of your audience. What kind of impact do you want the story of your social media life to have on your audience? Who, in particular, does your audience consist of? Broadly speaking, you might think of future employers, future children, close friends and family, but you’ll be more effective if you think of more specific audiences, such as teenagers that remind you of yourself who are struggling to cope through high school.
- Perform an analysis of the media artifact itself. Consider content, platform, date of publication, appearance, setting, language, and other relevant issues. How does the platform define its content, what rhetorical appeals does the artifact make, how does the language/style/appearance of the media artifact communicate a particular identity?
Learning Objectives
- Demonstrate awareness of how we narrate our social media identities online
- Demonstrate awareness of how we tailor our social media identities according to different platforms and different audiences
- Demonstrate awareness of how social media artifacts communicate different meanings in different contexts
Submission and Deadline
Submit a link to your social media narrative on Blackboard, by Sunday 9/18/2016 by 11:59pm.
Assessment
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Needs Improvement
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Meets Expectations
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Exceeds Expectations
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Narrative
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Tells a single story that connects all 10-15 artifacts together, especially when the artifacts represent such diverse facets of one’s identity; the narrative acknowledges individual change and growth over time
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Artifacts
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Presents artifacts from at least 3 different platforms that represent a wide variety of experiences, times, and places; provides a rationale for why each artifact has been included
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Related Readings
- Pew Research Center on Social Networking
- Pew Report on Social Media Usage
- Ian Bogost, “The Cigarette of This Century” (2012)
- danah boyd, “Addiction” from It’s Complicated (2014)
- “The History of Social Networking” (2016)
- “How Social Media Affects Our Self-Perception” (2014)
- “The Tyranny of Other People’s Vacation Photos” (2016)
- Jill Walker Rettberg, “Serial Selfies,” from Seeing Ourselves Through Technology (2014)
- “Predicting Well-Being Through the Language of Social Media” (2016)
- “What an Introvert Sounds Like” (2014)
- The World Well-Being Project
- “Life’s Stories” (2015)
- “This Is Your Life and How You Tell It” (2007)
- “The Stories We Tell: Social Media as Narrative Psychology” (2011)
- “Consider the Catfish” (2015)