Composition in Two Genres

Joyana Manisha

Professor Pawlowski

FIQWS 10111

GENRE #1: Audio Tape

Rationale

        Have you ever met a teenager who isn’t constantly glued onto their phones all the time? Well, that would be a rare site to spot. Adolescents and young adults are always on social media browsing through their feeds and sharing posts. Mental health plays an important role within social media. People become heavily influenced by different posts and try to make a change. Everything displayed on social media is shown to be picture perfect leading to lower self esteem issues. There are many people such as Instagram influencers who post pictures after making sure one picture went through several layers of editing in order to make the post “perfect”. I created a tape recording illustrating the process of how an individual chooses a picture to post but suffers from anxiousness as they receive likes and comments anticipating for the best to occur.

        It represents the mindset of an individual as they edit a specific picture to their “perfection” and posts it expecting for the best. This action can vary from becoming overwhelmed with the amount of likes or discouraged if they don’t receive the amount of likes they expected. This piece was inspired by the show “Thirteen Reasons Why” since the main character uses tapes to express her problems within her school. Majority of the teenagers would understand this tape while it could be quite confusing for the older generation.

Reflection

        In order to emphasize the mental stress that an individual goes through while posting a picture, I created a tape recording playing the thoughts that go through one’s head during this process. Through my recording, I could understand that some of the parts were a bit too over dramatic but that just adds passion to my point. Being someone who also edits and continually checks the number of followers and likes, I understand the pressure that some people undergo and how one’s self esteem could change drastically due to the number of likes and comments. Originally, I was going to create a twitter page in order to create conversation about mental health awareness within social media however, that idea seemed a little basic for me. I genuinely do not use twitter so I didn’t find any significance towards it and I wanted to make a statement with my genre.

        In my opinion, a tape recording would gravitate towards the audience more than just a normal twitter page. If I were to post this recording on any social media, it would probably catch more publicity and attention than a twitter page especially since, I am not too familiar with Twitter. Besides twitter, I also thought about creating a Facebook page. A Facebook page would’ve been nice as well however, it does not attract the specific group of audience that I needed for this topic. Not a lot of adolescents use Facebook nowadays so that just defeats the idea of spreading awareness among them. I’m quite pleased with the outcome of my recording since it plays out exactly how I wanted it to be like.

 

GENRE #2: Subway Poster 

Rationale

        In my first genre, I created a tape recording of an individual’s mindset as they proceed to post a picture and how their self esteem is dependent on the amount of likes and appreciation they receive. For my second genre, I decided to create a subway poster emphasizing how social media is negatively impacting our mental health. This subway poster is intended mainly for the older generation such as parents, teachers, school officials, etc in order to help prevent any future mental health problems from taking place. The older generation is not as frequent on social media as adolescents and young adults are and so spreading word to them can become a difficulty. A subway poster can be seen on the way to work and on the way back home. It will signify as a constant reminder to help those are experiencing self esteem issues due to social media activities.

        I chose to put a picture of a adolescent (a picture of me)  who is showing stress upon themselves and around that person, there are negative causes of social media revolving around the picture. The picture serves to express an important message through its simplicity and stays in everyone’s mind in order to help make a change. Many people tend to look at subway posters and not think too much of it which can stand as a predicament. However, there are those who enjoy looking through these posters and spreading word about them.

 

Reflection

        I learned that creating a subway poster is not as easy as it sounds like. At first, I was having trouble with how to execute my purpose and make it interesting at the same time. I wanted something that would be eye catching but informative at the same time in order to create a message. So I decided to add a picture of me taken as an off guard that all my friends use as a “MOOD” picture or for their memes as the main focus of the subway ad. After adding that picture, everything else fell into place. I put all the negative effects of social media revolving around me and I purposely made my picture blurry so that it shows how these effects overshadow and blur out my mental health.

        I believe that this subway poster can positively lead an impact upon those who see it and can also leave a message in order to help those are dealing with mental health issues. Adults seem to be unaware of what this generation is experiencing through social media since they are barely even on the sites and so you must take the message and put it directly in front of their eyes. What else can someone do instead of observing a subway poster while they are stuck in the train due to inconvenient delays?