Documentary Unit - Social Media Concept

After a lot of talk with the group we have decided to move forward with an idea for our documentary. We decided social media is a key environment in all of our lives and this needs to be explored further with how it could be potentially bad for us as well as good.

Our Idea is to take a person who falls in the teen bracket and strip away all the use of media from them for the course of 7 days and film them to see how they cope and adapt to modern situations without the use of technology. This includes no phones, laptops, tablets, computers or anything that can be connected to the Internet. I believe this as well as adding heightened situations where they would usually use social media would prove a very watchable and interesting experiment for our demographic as well as wider audiences.

Choosing the right person has to be key. We decided someone who is a YouTube vlogger would be a good way to approach this. They are comfortable in front of the camera but they also have a clear connection with the social media world creating the experiment more relevant. We would film them in day time hours for 7 days but also supply them with a go pro camera so if they feel we are missing something important when we are not there then they can film it themselves.

Ive done some reasearch into who uses social media and I found an interesting table.

Carried out by Pew Reseach Center in January 2014 it shows that younger women with moderate education in the lower earning bracket used social media the most.

I was also reading a study commissioned by Rebtel in 2016 which looked at the online habits of 2361 people in the United States. It explained that 68% of females chose to use social media as strong point of contact as apposed to 54% of men. This to me states that we should be looking for a YouTuber of this description to maximise our results of someone who feels deprived when their social media is taken away.

When concerntrating more on the teenage side of social media I researched a U.K. study of a 1000 teens by the IT firm Logicalis Group. It found that teens spent over an hour and a half everyday streaming online content. It also found that nearly an hour of their day was spent using messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp.

Its clear that teens are spending a large amount of their day on social media and we are setting out to see how bad a person would react in the circumstances to have this taken away. I want to see if it has a positive or negative impact, or even both.