POST #1
Preliminary research intermingled with prototypes created for purposes of assignment 2 has aided me greatly in producing my final media artefacts. I only hope to have actualised a piece of work that is both engaging and enlightening for viewers.
You can view the entire study here!
I have created varying scenes that act as an attempt to emulate the romanticised portrayals of reality commonly exhibited on social media. Through this exploration, I intended to examine how social media possess the modal capacity to grant many benefits, yet also facilitate involvement in social exclusion, harassment, unrealistic standards and outside influence of third-party advertising groups. Marketing that exploits feelings of inadequacy for profit is not at all an unfamiliar notion, however, remains unturned. I wanted to closely examine its effects on social media users
In accordance with research conducted in a precursory blog post, I intended to target a younger age bracket being within 18-24 years of age and female. As I have been examining Individuals who hold extreme desires to comply with social pressures, which I have found to be particularly existent within this group of individuals. As research demonstrates, when insecure these individuals tend to turn to excess and overcompensation. Brands will then utilise these negative feelings in order to bolster sales.
I have composed a sample size of 30 willing participants, all were female aged between 18-24 years of age. They were prompted to answer a series of multiple-choice questions, then provide a correspondingly short answer response. Questions referred to their personal engagement with social media and were given these images as reference.
I have hypothesised that engagement with said social media artefacts exhibited on Instagram will have a negative effect on social media users. However, I was particularly interested in how the individuals would then choose to engage with the content, regardless of its adverse effects.
Upon creating an Instagram profile, I attempted to emulate the appearance of many other social media creators in order to ‘blend in’ as much as possible. These images have been highly orchestrated for the purposes of this research, thus fake body, skin, background, accessories and so forth.
My findings show that most individuals believed that these artefacts were a truthful depiction of life. They overlooked many features which may suggest that this image had been altered.
I have discovered that the purposeful use of aestheticism and beauty does in actuality have an effect on user desirability, attention and ultimately engagement with social media posts. In regard to utilising this as a social media marketing technique, this appears to work favourably. This research supports previous claims of these individuals then turning to overcompensation upon engaging with this content, as they would either follow, like, comment or perhaps make a purchase.
When examining my findings I found varying words in which stood out to me, words such as insecure, jealous, envious and self-conscious, all terms used for self-depreciation. Such content has also proven to be quite frequent on social media, further suggesting that the growth of user interactivity has most definitely come with many ramifications.