Week 6: Project 2 Proposal

1. Concept
Our area of investigation is going to be identity, and how technology has affected it negatively. Our video will include statistics, reviews, and interviews on this topic.

2. Working Hypothesis
The inevitable development of the network society, has demanded in its core, constant innovation and development of communicative methods. Communication had a different meaning before globalization. Communication meant a phone call from a home line or a letter which reached a person 4-8 weeks depending on their location. Since communicative methods were different, it is safe to assume that relationships carried with them a different meaning as well. This has caused isolation of personal identities. Communication has changed individuality. The way we see and represent ourselves has changed vastly. Since there are more methods of expressing yourself, making friends and networks, learning, and engaging in activities with strangers; there is a misconception that communication has reached its peak. Yes communication has reached its peak, but with the loss of personal identity. According to Freud, we all have many different “persona(s)” hidden within us which only come out when a situation requires it. Persona, according to Wikipedia means “A persona, in the word's everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor”. The World Wide Web has given people more opportunities to communicate, but in return develop more personas within themselves. Hence, the network society has brought a loss of identity and isolation of individuals. This global culture is anonymous to personal feelings and the true identities of individuals. In our podcast we would like to target those people who feel that the wireless borders of the internet have caused them to lose the true essence of face to face, emotional, empathetic, emoticon-less communication, which are requirements of human nature and comfort. The computer has removed the true ways of communication, which have taken place for centuries. We would like to say in this podcast, through various points of views of people who have truly lost/hidden their true identity due to the developments of communicative technologies. We would like to ask people of different ages on how they feel the internet has brought about a loss of personal identity and true human communication.

3. Research Approach
We will be conducting field research as well as scholarly journals and articles which include recent statistics. We will be referring to journal articles, and citing them. Using statistics and research done previously by scholars and psychologists/sociologists we can back up our claim: loss of identity is perpendicular to enhancement of communication.

4. Treatment
For our video we plan to use a lot of real life, unscripted footage like interviews with people from different walks of life. The interviews will be broken down into segments that overlap each other and will be an informal questioning about how people act on the web and how they portray themselves on the internet. The concentration will be on how they willingly change themselves when they go on the internet. And if we find willing participants we might even get people to show us their personal pages and their online ‘personas’ on social networking sites like Facebook. In order to add some diversity to our video we plan to have a few animated sequences or at least a few original cartoon images like thought clouds or speech bubbles at certain points. For instance a possible opening sequence that we’ve thought about includes having a picture of a person divided with one side remaining ‘real’ while the other side is made into a cartoon with different speech and thought bubbles, that show the various identities the person has on the internet and in their daily lives. As for the sound, since our video is going to be interview based, any background music we add will be kept to a minimum so that the voices can be heard clearly. And to make sure that people understand the words spoken we even plan to add sub-titles for better accessibility. If we do have animated sequences, we will definitely add the required sound effects but we don’t intend to use much in that category as we don’t want to pull away from the interviews.