Intervention 1: My Social Media Life vs My Internal Struggles.

Intervention 1: My Social Media Life vs My Internal Struggles. 

We live in a society where social media plays an important role in our lives. The majority of us own a smartphone and have at least one social media platform where we share some part or in some cases numerous aspects of our social and personal lives. Sometimes our lives are not as happy as we share them on our Instagram, Tick Tock, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, Reddit, and many social media platforms that we have at our disposal nowadays. We all have internal battles and struggles, and we don’t always share them.  

On my first intervention for this class, I want to start using myself for this project, but I want to create a bigger project out of this. I would like to invite my friends, classmates, and family members to participate and join the conversation. I made a collage poster, and on one side I printed images that I have taken of myself. I am a self-portrait photographer and I am a cosplayer. I enjoy dressing up as the characters that I love, and I also love to perform as them. Alongside the pictures I wrote down the most common hashtags that I use to get followers to get people to see my content. I used hashtags like #love, #beautiful, #happy, #art, and #fun, among others. I used colors to emphasize happiness and fun. On the other side, I took self-portraits of myself being more vulnerable and sharing the sides of me that I do not share on my Instagram. Alongside them, I used words that I don’t use on my hashtags, but the words that I feel sometimes, like sad, desperate, and alone, among others. I decided to make these portraits in black and white to contrast with the colors I used for my social media images. 

As the book, The Art of Activism states: “For some, stepping off the curve may be like an epiphany, a blinding moment of clarity in which the injustices of the world are dramatically revealed, while for others it may be a slow awakening, learned indirectly” (Duncombe, Lambert. Page 18) My awakening was slow, and it became more clear when my 11 years old daughter started questioning behaviors that she has seen or heard in school or social gatherings. It is my responsibility to raise awareness that everything we see on social media is not real. Sometimes when we feel sad or depressed or left out, we look at people who look happy, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they are. We all have our internal struggles and we all have insecurities. 

“Over the long-term, our creative process needs to be imbued with a sense of hope and optimism.”(Duncombe, Lambert. Page 18) and my hope for this project is that more people want to tell me their stories and we can be part of the conversation. It is important to talk about this and create awareness and hopefully change some lives.