Looking Back on Social Media’s Impact on Generation Z

After reviewing everyone’s auto ethnographies, we all agreed that Rachel’s story would be the best on to adapt into a video since it was very relatable. Not only did all of our group relate to Rachel’s story, but we also felt like it would be easy for other students to relate. It also gave us the chance to call attention to a problem that directly and heavily affected all of our lives.

We began making our video by meeting and deciding that it would be unique if we all came up with personal stories about social media’s impact in our lives, with two members having positive stories and two members having negative stories. Isabella offered to put together a first draft of the video, which is what we used at our first in-class workshop. After receiving feedback in class, we decided that our video was too focused on trying to recognize everybody’s stories and not focused enough on Rachel’s story. After that, we realized we should probably utilize Rachel’s paper as a basis for our video. We went through her paper and looked at the different subheadings throughout the paper and broke it down. Focusing more on Rachel’s paper, we drafted a script. Afterwards, we shot some video footage. Since it’s Rachel’s story, it would be more effective to have Rachel do the voiceover for the video. Isabella found some online video footage that had to do with social media and then again offered to put together the video. After receiving some feedback, Kristen offered to then make another version of the video. Incorporating more personal footage was our next focus, since that was one major feedback. Highlighting more “they say, ” as well as changing some of the script to make it more personal to Rachel came next. Finally, we added title slides to each section to help with organization. After our meeting with Professor G, we made some final touches with changing how broad we ended and gave more clarification to the “they say”/researchers, and we added credits. We met one final time to watch the video, and then we uploaded it after we all agreed on the final product.

In our final film piece, The Impact of Social Media on Generation Z: An Autoethnography, we wanted to target a larger breadth of viewers. Although the title can be slightly misleading, we attempted to appeal to a wider audience than just said generation. Our intended audience would be anyone who is interested in the impact of social media on the latest and greatest epoch.

Social media has become such a dominating force in the lives of all in the 21st century, and its impact is startling on the future leaders of our free world. We wanted to investigate the influence of this controlling and widely accessible phenomenon to bring attention to all the positive and negative effects of social media on the developing mind of the members of Generation Z.

The audience of the essay our film piece was adapted from was similar to the audience of our film but with a higher level of knowledge required. The essay was a more scholarly level piece, whereas the film can be easily understood and enjoyed by all. The paper used slightly more logos (appeals to logic, usually made by using facts and statistics) while still incorporating elements of ethos. Whereas the film used logos and more pieces of pathos. It was easier to incorporate elements of pathos into the film since it was more casual and less scholarly. Often times in essays of higher caliber it is hard to use pathos without seeming as if the writer lacked the educational skills to use a method of persuasion that is more intellectually challenging.

The audience of the essay was more scholarly, seeing as it incorporated more advanced elements of academic persuasion. While the audience of the film was broader and open to people of all academic capabilities. The incorporation of videos, images, and audio recordings allowed for it to be more accessible and easily understood by all.

Overall the general audience in the film and the essay were the same: those interested in learning more about the toll social media takes on Generation Z.

Of course, this process was not perfect and there were challenges along the way. The biggest challenge for our group was simply understanding the assignment. We knew we would be adapting one of our Project 3 papers into a video, however, we didn’t know exactly what direction we were going to go in. After receiving feedback from this draft and viewing our classmates’ projects, we were able to readjust our plans and get on the right track. Utilizing Google Docs was helpful to some extent, but it was clear that in order to bounce ideas off each other and make big decisions, we would need to meet in person – this was definitely one of the biggest challenges of this project. Everyone was more busy than usual, and it was extremely hard to find free times that matched up. Lastly, a big challenge was actually making the video. As a group we all wanted to add to the video and give suggestions, however, since the video could only be made on one computer, it was very hard to share this workload. Isabella ended up having this task for our first two rounds of peer revision, and Kristen helped out and took over for the final draft. Even though we couldn’t split it up and all do separate parts on our laptops, it was helpful to share on Google drive and text any opinions we had about it. I wish we could have all split up the tasks of the video more, but to balance out those who didn’t work on the video did more work in other aspects (I-Rachel worked more on the script and audio recordings and Andrea worked on getting together the sources/putting out pieces of the reflection paper together). Looking back on this process, although we did face several challenges, we are all very happy with how it turned out.

Reflecting on the journey we endured during this project, I feel that we have improved not only our skills as writers but also as thinkers. Project 4 has been the most unique out of all the projects since it was a video, which contrasts the other projects as being papers. Since we had to take words on a paper and somehow turn them into a visual aid, there was a lot of collaborative effort in figuring out how to appeal to a new audience and adhere to an altered purpose. Our new popular audience required language usage that was easy to understand and easy to maintain engagement in – this is where we especially had to put our minds together and scheme out a script, pictures, and videos to effectively portray how a large portion in Generation Z is heavily affected by social media. It was not the easiest process, but we pulled through!

There are many experiences we encountered during this project that will definitely aid in future endeavors. For example, with this being a group project, our communication skills were heavily exercised. Therefore, we will reflect on what worked and what did not, and apply those in scenarios to come. In relation to specific tasks and deadlines, it is important to ensure that our jobs are not only met, but completed to our highest ability. Lastly, we will remember to keep an open mind with accepting others’ criticism and ideas, and learning how to incorporate various thoughts into a common ground the group feels is the most competent.

Overall, we were able to overcome obstacles such as time, effort, and commitment and succeeded in producing a video autoethnography of one of Rachel Seay’s identified in-group. Just like all writing, there is always room for improvement, but the adventure and exposure to this new kind of writing will help us in years to come.

Thanks for your time,

Rachel Seay, Andrea de Leon, Kristen Berry, Isabella Grana