I think this idea of the RAW project could also be applicable today, 20 years after the essay was published. I actually think it is more necessary today, because in the age of social media, I feel like it got very important to fake a lifestyle or an image of oneself, to appeal to the masses. How can we be sure, that the everyday lives people show us are not curated but have their real and authentic essence? It also comes down to which point of view these everyday lives are shown from. For example, how am I as an european woman supposed to get an unbiased view of the day to day life in mali?
It was interesting for me to read in which way these tools were used and with what kind of intentions.
Intentions mentioned:
A question, that I asked myself while reading this text was, if it were better to include people from the countries mentioned (France, Mali, Ireland) in the process of designing the RAW tool, to establish a better connection to the users or to make the tool more relatable so that it fits in the culture of the participants? Maybe this could be an approach to solve the problem, that the users in Mali did not perceive the reason for the presence of the way the authors wanted to.
New term:
Social media is something, that I reflect on a lot, that’s why this topic is especially interesting to me. I could identify with a lot of things written in the text, especially the part where she talked about social media giving teenagers the freedom that they didn’t have as adults. Now that I am an adult, I find myself barely using social media. It never really occured to me, that the reason, why I use social media way less, could be my gained freedom. To be honest, even as a teenager, social media put a lot of pressure on me to present a certain way to appeal to my classmates for example, because I just wanted to belong to a group. Even now, using social media leads me to comparing my clothing style, my lifestyle, my looks with other people’s lifes, looks, etc. Social media made me more insecure actually, because I just kept comparing myself. For my friends, social media had a more positive impact on expressing themselves. I guess, social media had a more negative impact on me than on others, that’s why I am so critical of it. I feel like social media has shaped society in an interesting way in terms of how we perceive each other, and nowadays I don’t feel like social media gives us as much freedom as we want, because social media is still a form of policing people, judging each other on what we see, which doesn’t capture the whole human being. Social media has also brought up a lot of different cultures, like for example cancel culture, where people just dismiss people, without taking them as beings into consideration and maybe reducing a person on one tweet or whatever.
This paper was written in 2003, twenty years prior to now, so ofcourse a lot of changes with social media have occured since then. Just like twenty year ago, teenagers use social media as a means to connect with their friends and to express themselves. My cousin has two girls in the age of 10 and 12. Her daughters use social media as means to keep in touch with their friends, to express themselves, they record tik tok videos and so on. My cousin doesn’t actually like social media, but she doesn’t want her daughters to feel excluded from their friend groups and be the only ones that don’t use social media. What I have noticed in this particular age group, is that trends catch on on them particularly fast, because if they don’t follow them, they will most likely be exluded. I feel like, the part of being able to express oneself through social media is something that catches on later in life, when you think more about yourself, what you want and who you are.