In a rehearsal yesterday, after the thoughts that were discussed in my first work-in-progress, I decided to use social media as a starting point. The reason being was that I was concerned that I was approaching a very niche topic that had too much to say. It does not mean to say that doing a niche topic is bad but that if you do a niche topic then there must be a reason on why you want to do it. Thus, I decided to just scrap the idea and think of something else.
Throughout this time of discussing the thoughts, I decided to pinpoint some ideas that were discussed and one of them was the way of how social media had become a platform for privacy for people to type away stuff that was not heartfelt or used for a personal agenda and decided to think about something that has angered me before and comments that have made me feel annoyed about certain topics. With that, I decided to write down some instances that had occurred in the last five years or so and decided to write down what triggered me and why it made me feel triggered.
When writing up certain things up. Certain topics like Brexit, Donald Trump and other stuff such as equal pay came up and I decided to dismiss these as I felt that these ideas were too generic and there was nothing original or new to mention. As I kept thinking about ideas that angered me, I started thinking about the “#PrayFor” movement used to pay respects for certain people. Such certain ones that came up when researching were #PrayForParis and also a #PrayForLeah which was based off the person who was injured in the Alton Towers Smiler Rollercoaster Crash.
(Jullien, 2015).
However, I felt very annoyed about this as I personally feel that people used this trend as an idea to jump on the bandwagon and use this for their own personal agendas to highlight instead of paying respects. Indeed, as I was doing some further research, I decided to do a research on YouTube and found a video that showcased some unknown attacks that were going on similarly to the time of Paris for example. Whilst it is important to note that some people do genuinely use it to pay their respect, what was clear in the videos was that certain attacks are not known due to the popularity of the place. Yet, I personally believe that some of this was down to the fact that people used the hash tag to metaphorically “jump on the bandwagon” as seen in the following video.
(Adrian Fernandez, 2015).
As I was thinking through this idea, it was based on three incidents on people using the #PrayFor as a platform to gather their thoughts and not taking action and instead using it as a fad. In this piece, I was thinking of using three incidents being Paris, The Alton Towers Incident and the recent Florida shooting. The reason using this was because of this. As we know, it was mainly the Paris shooting that triggered the “PrayFor” movement but part of the reason to use the Alton Towers Incident was because my friend was involved in the incident and personally, I still feel affected in the community of friends that are know of Leah yet a lot of other people have moved on. I then decided to juxtapose the two things with the Florida Shootings to show how society is moving on and taking action and therefore there was no more of a sense that people were using it for a trend and instead wanting to take action.
However, when working on this, I felt this was too much and decided to stick to only one incident that would be the main focus. Because of this, I have chosen to focus on the Alton Towers Incident. However, instead of looking it from the angle of social media, I have decided to focus on the community side of it and a particular incident I had a couple of years after the incident and how that has personally affected me in trying to face the incident in the past. Therefore, the piece will be on that in particular. I have already started contacting the person involved in the incident and I intend to interview her about the event.
Whatever the case is, I hope that this will be a piece that can alarm people in understanding that revisiting the past can be unhealthy and not good.
Works Cited:
Adrian Fernandez (2015) #PrayForParis (World Peace) AVIID Edition. Available from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rePXvaDQPBE [accessed 26 March 2018].
Laurent, O. (2015) 70 Million Shared Their Prayers for Paris on Instagram This Weekend. Time Magazine, 16 November. Available from http://time.com/4114288/paris-instagram/ [accessed 26 March 2018].