In this unit project, my main purpose/aim was to show how social media can make people lose connection to reality, feel isolated, or experience things such as depression, anxiety, and body dysmorphia. I wanted to accomplish this by showing different sides of social media instead of simply saying that it has a negative effect on people.I can acknowledge that sometimes I see the negative side of social media affecting me and find myself falling into the same habits but I did not want my work to be a personal experience. Instead, I wanted it to be more of a connection to a topic that we all experience in our own ways.
This assignment asked us to make something original from material that we did not originally create or write. I liked this idea because it allows me to use real-life examples on social media, cite articles that explain this concept deeper, and use work from different artists to tie everything together into the same idea. The goal of this project was to take different interpretations and ideas from other artists who are fighting for the same message and put them together in my own way.
I chose the sources shown in this piece because most of it was things I’ve seen before or sources I’m familiar with. For example, The Atlantic is a reliable source that I used in boarding school and two of the art pieces were pieces I had seen while researching for previous courses. I also used a research article from Yale and other sources that I found while researching this project because I wanted to source different places so that my collage would show more than a couple of people’s perspectives.
The way I presented this project is also important to me. I like making photo collages as decorations, gifts, and as a form of scrapbooking, so creating this work was actually fun and interesting for me. Placing the “Social Media” at the top and layering the photos the way I did is because it’s the main subject that connects to the whole piece. Including the phone with the poem inside emphasizes our obsession with cell phones and allows the viewer to look directly into the problem.
My text is original because even though I combined other artists’ ideas, articles, artwork, and examples into my collage, I still originated this idea myself. I had an original idea of what I wanted the final product to look like before bringing all these elements together. In this generation, where it’s hard to call something original because there are so many ideas and people before you, I consider this original because I thought of the collage myself and I had an idea of what I wanted in the final product before I relied on someone else. At the same time, I would not consider every aspect of this project completely original because I did not invent collages. I’ve seen other collages on Pinterest and other apps that influenced my idea of what a collage should look like. This made me morph all of these perspectives into something that felt like my own.
In conclusion, I do not consider my piece plagiarism because I incorporated many different components and ideas into my work making it correspond with my original idea. I did not take other people’s work and present it as my own. I intentionally collected information from other people, credited my sources, and transformed the material into something brand new. Originality comes from copying, transforming, and combining existing ideas. With practically nothing being considered original anymore and everyone consciously or unconsciously taking ideas from other people, this project is not considered plagiarism to me.