Project Proposal for Abbey Hudson and Maria Goudy

For our final project, we hope to expose the social detachment individuals experience while glued to their smart phones. This generation is immersed in a culture that craves to be plugged into each other’s lives at all times via Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook, to name a few. However, these media outlets create a false sense of socialization because in reality we mute our personal relationships by zoning out of face-to-face interaction with individuals to satisfy the urge to stay connected. It is not an unusual sight to see people staring at their phones in public settings instead of having a conversation with their peer, significant other, or family member. We are all guilty of this, even ourselves, of paying too much attention to our smart phones, which makes examining this infatuation so fascinating, because we are aware of our impersonal communication with those around us, but we stay steadfast in our ways.

We have decided to create a video with both video and audio footage depicting the way in which people put each other on hold while tuned into their smart phones. We want to explore the relationship individuals have with their smart phones and communication through these devices. Together we plan to observe couples, families, and friends interacting together in public and document their phone usage while together. Over the course of two months we will visit various restaurants, coffee shops, malls, and other public places to watch people. During this time we will record our findings and take notes on situations we observe in order to talk about these events in our video.

We plan to draw from principles discussed in Unit One and Unit Two of this course. We have deemed the Symbol Systems and Icons as well as the Photography section of these units vital for our production. Furthering the impersonal contact smart phones produce, emojis are now being used instead of words for communication between people. Instead of formulating thoughtful responses, symbols can be used solely to communicate. Additionally, interaction is now felt from seeing and “liking” posts of photos from sites, such as Facebook or Instagram, that desire to convey a feeling of personal interaction, but in reality, we are just viewing activity through a screen, instead of being with a person participating in a certain event. This false sense of social interaction tricks our generation into having intimate relationships with Facebook “friends.”

We will be working with a video camera to record our footage before uploading the footage to a laptop. We have decided to use a video camera rather than a smart phone because we want our footage to have clear quality and specialize in recording. Furthermore, a memory chip with enough storage to hold our footage will need to be purchased. Also, we will need to edit the video footage and add audio as well to our production; thus, we may use iMovie to aid our efforts in editing our production. We wish to explore various editing devices to find one that will be easy to use and contain all of the features needed to create our video and audio masterpiece.

Attached to this article is an article and two videos that are related to the research we will be conducting in our final project. The article examines the physical and mental tolls technology takes on the human body. The two videos attached argue that human interaction is deteriorating because of the intense infatuation we have with technology and social media. Each piece makes an important assertion and correspond with our efforts for this final project.