Unit 3 Reflection

 Unit 3 Reflection 

In collaboration with Claire Samstag:

Reflecting on our collaboration, it's remarkable how seamlessly we came together despite never having worked as a team before. We have been friends for a while, and it is fascinating to see what our two combined brains can create. Throughout our collaboration, communication and mutual respect were key pillars that facilitated our progress. We actively listened to each other's ideas, provided constructive feedback and built upon each other's contributions. This open exchange of perspectives allowed us to explore the nuances of our topic comprehensively, ensuring that our presentation was well-rounded and insightful.

It was really interesting to observe how we came together to effectively synthesize our ideas into a coherent project that creates something new from something old. With two people and our new ideas, we were able to form something really fascinating and different from what we first thought it could be.

Our joint effort in creating a presentation centered around social media, cancel culture, and mental health allowed us to express pressing issues in society. From the beginning, we noticed that each of us had something different to bring to the table. Claire knew a lot about social media trends, and cancel culture, which helped us get started. Reggie had an excellent grasp on how online interactions can affect people's mental health in teens, adding much depth to our contributions to our Unit 3 Portfolio presentation. Diving deeper into our topics, we encountered overlap and decided to combine our previous projects to state a new claim. 

The three different topics that we delved into connected in ways that we did not necessarily expect. We knew that the topics could be connected based on our individual research on them and the hypotheses that we came up with. Still, we needed to make the connection of the common thread of communication that ties all of the topics together. Using communication as a medium for understanding the ways in which these topics connect goes back to our earlier units in writing. We were able to understand that despite the differences in research and differences in examples that we each used, the theme of communication applies to them all. How we communicate and why we communicate the way we do affects everything else. 

Our exploration of cancel culture in our presentation revealed significant dangers. One of the most alarming aspects we uncovered is its propensity to stifle conversations rather than foster resolution. As stated in our presentation, “It stops the conversation.” The rapid spread of misinformation and the echo social media creates for these falsities can lead to irreversible judgment or negative opinion on something that may not be true. As stated in the presentation: “People can say anything they want online about anyone they want, other people chime in, and before you know it, you’re clicking through story after story of someone telling you to unfollow someone, and then boom, someone else in the United States has been canceled.” 

The dangers of cancel culture and social media have harmful impacts on mental health, which is another way that our topics interact with one another. For people that get canceled online (which, again is usually celebrities), they can experience great amounts of emotional turmoil. Influencers or celebrities that have gone through this have then said afterward that it really did take a toll on them. Most importantly, the fear or anxiety of being canceled can create a rigid environment where people may feel the need to censor themselves and not act authentic to who they are. Social media is also dangerous in its constant communication format, where people often find themselves in comparison or feeling different ways towards the media they interact with online.

Although this project went extremely well with collaboration and communication between the two of us, there are things that we both know we could work on and improve going forward. We will take the lessons that we have learned in this writing class beyond the classroom and apply it to our other courses and just life in general. We could have gotten more interactive content for our slide show, besides just our podcast. We both could have gone deeper to find another interactive tool for a different part of our topic. 

Our overarching claim in our project was that the effectiveness of “cancel culture,” social media, and mental health needs to be assessed in that cancel culture and social media are often a continuum of fake news spewing and misinformation. We touch on the hypocrisy of the term “cancel culture”, that it defeats the purpose of what its people preach. We supported this idea by showing from personal experience how arbitrary and false “cancel culture” can be and how detrimental social media can be. We made these choices in hopes to could get across the message that “cancel culture” and “social media” has tormented my generation. It has stopped discussion, and it has only made misinformation more multifaceted.

From Claire: In my individual reflection of this assignment, I found that working with another person allowed me to expand my thoughts and tap into other aspects of communication that I hadn't had in my work in previous units. Working with Reggie was so great and awesome because our topics connected with one another so well and it allowed me to explore my own thoughts and ideas further. I really enjoyed having this opportunity to bounce ideas off one another and learn more from Reggie’s previous research and work. I found his podcast to be incredibly insightful, as I also know the student that he collaborated with for that portion of his project. I found meaning and depth in what she had to say about the positives and negatives of social media, and I believe it was incredibly instrumental to our final project to have that perspective. 

From Reggie: I like to explain my thoughts. Even when I am assigned a solo project, I still like to talk it out with someone. I am so grateful for being granted the opportunity to work with someone on this project because I was able to expand my thoughts with Claire’s help, and she was able to do the same. Since the topics we wanted to explore were so similar we decided to combine forces and cover all to reach the end goal of “Social media, cancel culture and mental health all contain similar trends of technology and communication. We can use communication as a medium for understanding these topics, and be mindful of how they overlap.” Claire also has a strong background in writing, so she was able to help me develop my thoughts into words and I learned a lot from her. 

Feedback From Emma Ziff: “I really enjoyed watching your presentation. It helped me learn a lot about the dangers of cancel culture. I wish you had incorporated some statistics about how social media directly connects to the decline in mental health.”

Hearing Emma speak this way about our project made us feel seen. We felt super valid in our opinions and choice to pursue this topic. Hearing our audience (the people in our WRT 205 class) interested in the message we have to say helped us form the conclusion of our argument. We also incorporated the statistics of what Emma said we could improve on by doing a bit more research and finding scholarly articles from the National Library of Medicine. 

In summary, our teamwork demonstrated how different viewpoints can come together to address important societal issues. We valued open communication and respect, which helped us blend our ideas effectively. While there's room for improvement, the feedback we received encouraged us to stay focused on our message. Overall, our collaboration highlighted the ongoing need for discussions about social media, cancel culture, and mental health.