Social Media Traits

In our video we cover many traits that teens display while using social media by re-enacting them.

The first example we cover is the obsession. This is often where the split personality begins. Teenagers go from occasionally checking their texts or social media to not being able to leave their phone alone for ten minutes without worrying about replying to someone’s message or checking their social media notifications. Statistics show that the average person checks their phone 110 times a day and it is checked more frequently at night. In our video we show a girl panicking after leaving her phone for no more than five minutes in case she had missed anything on her social media. Although it seems exaggerated it is a surprisingly accurate and often occurrence in this day and age.

Next we acted out girls posing for pictures. The girls looked as though they were having a great time in the photo and were, “caught off guard” when in reality it was faked to make a cool and convincing image. More than 17 million selfies are uploaded onto social media per week on average. We try to portray the fake image teenagers give off when posing for a picture as they go from smiling and laughing to being very serious about whether the picture is good enough to be posted for the world to see. Often these images come with a misleading caption stating that they had no idea the picture was being taken to delude the viewer into thinking that that is the case.

To follow this we decided to show you the way girls hoard images and photographs on their phones and social media rather than live in the moment. We will demonstrate this in a concert situation as if someone was up on stage singing. Everyone teenager stands behind their device filming the event to later post on their social media claiming, “I want this to watch after the concert is finished.” Although they end up never watching it again but also storing it away and never deleting it. It is becoming a big social problem as many teenagers would rather experience life behind their screens than get out there and do something in real life.

Nowadays there is a new term used for people who take photos of their meals and post them on social media profusely. Sometimes they even go to the extent of sacrificing their food for the video as we show in our demonstration. Here we show a girl taking different images from every possible angle as her friend watches her. By the time she is satisfied with her image her food is cold and she refuses to eat but this does not stop her from captioning the picture “so delicious.” It is a ridiculous thing but many teens follow this trait to get the right picture to match their ideal aesthetic.

To finish our video up we re-enact girls who take advantage of their surroundings to pretend they were doing something they were not to look cool. For example many girls will sit somewhere natural looking and out their hands palm to palm with the caption “this was so Zen,” when in reality they took a quick picture and moved on. They do this to create a good look for their aesthetic and so the people that are able to see their social media think it’s cool and become inspired to do the same thing if they are gullible. This is just a small example we used but many things come under this topic of reality vs on social media.

During our video we also show a teenage girl showing off her outfit of the day or “otd.” No matter what they are wearing many girls post these pictures daily with a goal of becoming someone’s fashion inspiration when in reality no one minds what they wear. Over time these posts become annoying to most people but it does not stop the person from posting them profusely to get likes or get sponsored. Many teenagers will put on a cool outfit, snap a picture, post it and then take the outfit off because they only wanted to look like they were wearing it. In conclusion this trend is utterly pointless.

To summarise, in our video we are mainly comparing real life to social media as many people mislead others with their social media and become very different people on line. We tried to capture what we see in our day to day lives that we would not have seen before social media, in a slightly exaggerated and entertaining fashion. Although some of these features seem unbelievable we used examples that are all completely true and we have witnessed ourselves.