Monthly Archives: June 2015

Things that went to plan and things that didn’t went to plan

 

  • Schadenfreude- If Tumblr treats me well (if we’ve learned anything from this project it’s: always trust in Tumblr) schadenfreude is a German word for “the feeling of pleasure derived by seeing another’s misfortune. This was always meant to be our motivator for the story, a kind of black comedy element where the audience must eventually look at themselves and think, oh god how did I get here. I think this has stuck. I’ve tried navigating our project as if I’d never seen it before and I feel like I am motivated by some sick desire to see what happens to Emily and discover more about her incredibly sad personality. Whether or not the true audience (I’m looking at you, Dan) will be motivated by the same desire and see the irony still stands to be seen.
  • Sexualisation unexpectedly came up as a major theme but I made a whole other post on that, I think it’s worth a read.
  • The narrative was pretty fleshed out, but considering the universe of Emily, very similar to our own, is unending, we could have fleshed it out a whole lot more. If we had countless hours and dollars to spend, we could have created online presences for other teenagers in Emily’s school, we could have used models in order to give them a more realistic persona through the use of selfies. More would have taken place through video and voice acting. All that kind of stuff. Instead we’ve used lots of reblogging and textual posts. This is ok, for a project of this size, but there was potential to go bigger.
  • It was almost too realistic. I think in the beginning we expected our themes to be so obvious that we didn’t think that we’d need to explain anything. However when testing out the story on people that knew nothing about it, they mostly just said it was super realistic, and because the teen attitude that we’ve portrayed is so common and normal, people didn’t think much of it. This is ironic because the comedy of our project is that this is a caricature of real life, but apparently it’s so realistic that it’s difficult to see it as fiction and therefore understand the themes and concepts behind the story. Because of this we had to add the Statement of Intention page. It’s a definite improvement and hopefully clarifies the decisions that we made without giving away so much information that it tells the story without people needing to follow the actual story.
  • The Instagram page, that we originally thought would be an important element, became almost obsolete.  The transmedia method requires that different elements of the story be significant to the story, but the Instagram elements aren’t. They build character but only slightly and in a way that is very similar to the regblogging on the Tumblr anyway. We were originally intending to post information on the Instagram so that not all events unravelled on the Tumblr, however we found it difficult to do with only images. If we had more time I think we could have used it much better, but it did become irrelevant. Instead we created a Facebook page that fleshes out the story in place of the Instagram. It adds a whole other element of discussion about the themes after the event of Emily’s death and allows us to employ more remix theory by linking to similar stories or studies about our themes, that reinforce the significance of the issues that our story explores.

The Sexualization and Suicide of Emily Doee

A theme that came up that was not planned was the sexualisation of women and the more interesting and significant issue of young women sexualising themselves and the motivations/influences behind this. It’s interesting that this came up because feminism is something that united our group form the beginning and yet it wasn’t something we planned to work into the story, but of course, this feminist issue surfaced naturally.
We’ve really tried to reinforce the fact that Emily is not only influenced by highly sexualised celebrities, but also by young women posting sexualised photos of themselves on Tumblr. We showed that these are real young women making their own decisions by reblogging real ‘selfies’ from young women that have been posted to Tumblr; thus demonstrating that we’re not making this up, it’s a real and widespread issue. It felt a bit gross reflagging them but it’s supposed to and it’s as terrifying as it should be when viewed in the context of Emily’s blog and her mindset of self-hate due to unrealistic expectations.
What we’re trying to say here is that the sexualisation of women influences naive young people to mimic the behaviour because the media, now more than ever in the digital age, has positioned beauty and attractiveness to the opposite sex as the main factors of worth. All you can see in an image is aesthetic beauty; a photo shows nothing of intelligence, kindness, creativity or resilience and mental strength. Yet, because photos, often photoshopped or portraying unrealistic models (and a model is always a role model), are what we consume most, directly or indirectly; aesthetics are becoming more important than substance to those who only look to these images for an understanding of the world. This is so often young people, who in general consume main stream media as a majority because it is so easily accessible to them (companies are competing aggressively for their attention) and through widespread circulation it becomes perceived as popular and spreads and so similar content is made.
It is a vicious cycle. Emily is a victim of this cycle and this problem is at the very core of our story, it is, in my opinion, the antagonist that Emily does not recognise and therefore does not even attempt to overcome. (Another important point, when the bully is invisible to the victim, it’s impossible to for them to overcome the bully.) It was inevitable that sexualisation would come up, and I’m so glad it did. Learning to say ‘fuck you’ to the ideals that are sold to me and to others by the media we consume, rather than falling to it and feeling shit about myself, is something that I have struggled with alongside the timeline of this project. I think that the purpose of story is to broaden people’s understanding of the world. As it is, we generate understanding through our own experiences of the world, story is the way in which we understand the world through other people’s experiences. Creating this project made me understand more about the world than I did before, and I hope that that is the result for others as well.