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Lauren Cornman

Professor Ristow

4 May 2018

Self-Reflection on Collaborative Project

For this collaborative project, I worked in Team Two with Katrina, Ellie and Aldo. The objective
for our team was to define the features of “gendered performance” within Instagram and
deciding what elements of Instagram were valuable artifacts within the video essay medium. Our
team decided to create four separate video essays and then combine them into one. For my
portion, I was responsible for creating the concluding section so I had to summarize the findings
from the survey, observe what was particularly interesting, and reflect on what it meant for
society. Our group decided our individual portions should be around 1 minute each so that the
final video was somewhere between four to five minutes. In my video essay, I opened with the
statistic that told the percentage of male and female responses. I decided to focus on these
percentages rather than also including individuals who identified as “other” because there was
more data when comparing women and men and I also wanted to examine the statistics through a
feminist criticism lens. After, I transposed the other statistics in front of a Vanity Fair interview
between the actors Lucy Hale and Tyler Posey, who were discussing their different Instagram
posts. I thought this would be an interesting visual because while the viewer reads stats from the
survey, they can observe the different ways a young man and young woman discuss their own
Instagram pages. Additionally, the video provides examples of a what a typical young woman’s
Instagram is versus a young man’s.

While I observed several differences between men and women, I thought it would be crucial to
include a statistic where men and women have a similar opinion, which is why I included the
stat, “Both men and women feel the actual picture is the most important aspect over the caption,
time, or aesthetics.” I thought it was important to observe the percentage difference between men
and women who use Instagram because it further shows that women use Instagram as a creative
digital outlet to express themselves since there are not as many opportunities to do so in the real
world. After observing all of the information gathered from the survey, and examining Feminist
Criticism, I came to the conclusion that women use Instagram more frequently and have more
profiles on Instagram to challenge a societal structure of domination that would typically be
ruled by men. This is why I emphasized the Foss quote, “Everyone is seen as deserving of the
same respect and same opportunities for self-expression.” While my main role was to summarize
and conclude the information gathered from the survey, I thought it was important to point to the
societal implications of why women use Instagram in a different way from men.