DIY Senior Integrative Project

Abstract

I initially set out to use Heidegger’s Being in Time as the foundational theory for revealing illusions of authenticity and resoluteness in everyday life through the short form social media content labeled “do-it-yourself”. Do-it-yourself is a category of internet content that offers short and long video instructions on a vast area of projects without the aid of a professional or certified expert. As a child and senior college student I have found myself leaning towards online platforms as anonymous and expertless educational spaces. But in experiencing my own struggles with completing this project I have questioned my relationship to my educational experience and reimagined the purpose of this project. Especially now, with a pandemic forcing classrooms to exist online in the same realm as savvy consumer algorithms, what is the impact on the human Being? There is more to be understood and questioned in the structural relations of education and capitalist media beyond what I initially considered as the critique of consumerist media under Heideggar’s Being in Time. My own social media addiction, low self efficacy, and “gen z” identity has met up with my interests in existentialism, youth development, psychological narrativity and psychoanalysis in my own struggles with this project. In this assignment I have played with my own symbolic relations and questioned how consumer culture potentially destabilizes Dasein’s ability to encounter itself authentically. Quite literally I have shown my attachment to a DIY identity in my shortcomings for the requirements of this project.