Instagram world – media workshop.

On Thursday, October 29, 2020, using the space of the future Social Center Jedro in Murter, a media workshop was held with eighth grade students of Murterski Elementary School to discuss the picture of the world presented by social networks, specifically Instagram.

We live in the digital age and life without social networks is unthinkable. However, in this “coexistence” with social networks, it is important to develop a critical attitude towards them, to rise above the sea of information served and to choose for ourselves what content and for how long we want to consume. In other words, the point is that we use social networks, not the opposite.

At the beginning of the workshop, the students were invited to “be on their cell phones” for a minute, as if they were at home. Afterwards, the workshop leader asked them what information they found out, whether that information was valuable to them, whether they remembered it all, whether they enriched it. As expected, the answers could be gathered in one sentence: “The power of insignificant information”. During the workshop, students were shown two short videos; the first shows how the “perfect” Instagram world is created, and the second shows a lady who used the Instagram network to help herself fight her deteriorating health.

In both videos, the image of reality was falsified, but with different motives and goals. After watching the videos, a discussion developed in which the students addressed the challenges of this digital age in which we live in a very interesting and mature way.

At the end of the workshop, the facilitator showed the students several classic works of fine art to which contemporary creatives added certain digital elements such as emojis, labels for “characters” and the “like”. It was very interesting to hear the opinions and interpretations of these works from Murter elementary school students.

The aim of this workshop was to develop critical thinking and use social networks as a tool that facilitates or enables our daily life and avoid the trap of uncritically “staring” at the screens, and the questions that ended this “instagram” socializing were:

What information am I interested in? What do I want to read, study, think about? What activities truly and truly fulfill me? And most importantly, how can I rule social networks, use them as my tool (as opposed to them ruling me and my time)?

Everyone must find the answers to these questions for themselves.