Reflection on Feedback from Elevator Pitch and Changes to Project

I am quite pleased with the feedback I received from the pitch I delivered in yesterday's class, both in the form of our discussion afterwards and the information collected from my peers by the module leader.

It was generally agreed that I had an interesting subject matter to tackle and that it was a very contemporary idea. Social media has taken a lot of focus out of our lives and I think everyone engaged in a good debate as to whether this was a positive or negative thing or not. This is promising, as this is what I want my photo-essay to achieve also.

One problem that others pointed out is that my photographs may end being too similar to each other. I agree with this and it was something that I was initially worried about. To overcome this, I have decided to pick out a feature of different social media platforms and put them in a real life setting to get us think whether or not these are true expressions of ourselves. Take for instance, the Facebook 'Like'. Are we able to fully express our feelings (and simultaneously show a true reflection of ourselves) towards someones post just by hitting a symbol on a screen? I find it's reduces us all to a singular, uniform expression to show we think positively about something - it takes a way our individuality. 

On further reflection, I have noticed how now Facebook has introduces different ways to 'Like' things on the social media platform to overcome the observation that I have made. This is by allowing users to select a facial expression to go alongside our 'Like' to indicate to the person receiving them some further information about the reaction their post evoked. I believe the same reductionist notion still stands, and these facial expressions, known online as the 'emoji' is also something I will explore in my photo-essay. Hopefully, this further reflection will avoid any repetition in my project that my peers have preemptively highlighted, but still manages to adhere to the brief I explore human identity through social media users and the platforms they use.

My peers have also highlighted to me the need to find some more photographers and artists that deal with the same themes. I found this incredibly difficult to achieve when putting my pitch together, but I will continue to explore. I may be able to widen my search by not being so specific about finding photographers and social media users that look at social media, and instead find ones that deal with technology and human behaviour more generally.