Abstract

Social medias are websites or in the recent years’ applications that allow users to create, share, and participate in online social networks. Users invest time and money into building their presence online, and continuously pour efforts into perfecting that presence and drawing attention to it. Jobs have arisen due to the demand of strategies on how to the best encourage participation and attract attention in online social media sites for companies and their products. With social media now being such an important part of life with human growth, interaction, development, and relationships all at its feet; the question arises of how does it affect us arises?

‘Signed off’, is a final project experiment which I subjugated myself to undergo. The task of the experimental project embarked on the basis in which I, Mariah Rajah, would completely and purposefully disconnect myself from all social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Tumblr, and Twitter. This experiment hopes to track through daily blog posts, captured video, and photos how the disconnect affects my attention and participation structures, as well as provoke or bring into the light underlying psychological disturbances caused to either emotion or affect during the two-week experiment.

With the support of research material, I hope to prove how social networking sites are a large contributor to the decline in generation Z’s cognitive ability to process, find, and pay to longer forms of  information whether video content or text, to disregard the need to take part in face-to-face contact and interactions, to lack social skills, to display signs of attachment and addiction, to lack the ability to deal with problems without the need for mediation communicative applications, as well as to crave or demand the need for instant gratification in all aspects of life. ‘Signed Off’ hopes to shine light on the ways social media has removed human behaviors from humans and led them to only being to best functioning individuals in online spaces.

‘Signed Off’ PowerPoint Presentation