Social Reality – Create your own emoji-troll

Signe Sandfeld Hansen, M.Sc. in Psychology and counsellor, CfDP We have now held 12 out of 20 workshops in youth clubs and schools across the country. All these places work with young “special-needs” people aged 12-16, particularly including people with ADHD, autism disorders, or other behavioural- or developmental disorders.

What are we doing at our workshops?

Each place receives two workshops where participants create their own emojis which focus on respectively positive and negative aspects of social media. In the first workshop young people make their own “Emoji-troll” which is sort of an image of the challenges they may encounter on social media – for instance, some people have depicted how they feel addicted to social media. The other workshop have people make their own interpretation of a so-called “Emoji-hero” which must symbolise what one can do about their challenges. For instance, in this case, some people have made drawings of a turned off mobile phone. So far, young people have reacted positively toward the concept, and they have contributed plenty of well-thought inputs to what may be difficult, and what they believe may be done. The first workshop also offers help from one of the project’s role models who, themselves, experience cognitive challenges which have affected their behaviour on social media. The role model is an older young person (18+), who personally knows about dealing with challenges on social media, and who can assist young people to reflect on their behaviour online.

Addiction is a common feature

The main common feature has been the fact that a lot of young people feel almost addicted to social media in order to keep up with what others are doing, and keeping in touch with their friends. In return, they are aware that letting your mood, wardrobe, or opinion depend on how many likes such updates have received on Facebook, is not a healthy path. Emojis created by young are people are filmed and finally put together in a short video, using that person’s voice as a soundtrack. They will describe what the emoji looks like and what it does. Completed movie-clips are now available on cyberhus.dk/socialreality. Experiences from our workshops will be used to develop a game about sound behaviour on social media which may help care-workers in their work. Would you like more information, please contact Signe Sandfeld Hansen @ signe@cfdp.dk.]]>