We, the coordinators of the audiovisual area and new formats of SomAtents, Arianna Giménez and Marc Saludes, had the opportunity to share a morning of discussions and reflections on the use of social networks with 3rd grade students from the Cor de Maria high school in Olot.

In SomAtents we are aware that social networks are a space where journalism can be used and that platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook have their own language that especially younger people are familiar with, as long as we make use of them in a critical and meditated manner.

For this reason, the talk began with a dialogue between all those present in the classroom about the time we occupied ourselves with these applications. Together we noticed that we can’t keep our eyes off them for a single moment. However, when we asked the students if they gave much thought to the content they uploaded, the majority replied “no”.

Another topic of debate was what we could call “the monopoly of happiness”, especially when it comes to Instagram. Most of the photos that we are exposed to, as well as those that we post ourselves, represent happy moments. As a group, we came to the conclusion that this over-representation of our best moments does not correspond to our daily routine and that, on the contrary, those users who most exploited these contents were those that deserved less credibility.

The second part of the workshop, which came after having discussed other aspects of the iconography of the networks, consisted of sharing with the students the proposal to create a film festival for Instagram. The Instagram Stories format is a good tool to work on different storytelling elements, such as narrative introductions, scenes, characters, visual metaphors and closures.

Together, we came up with a story that had happened to one of the students and we made a storyboard taking into account the best way to explain, from a journalistic perspective, the story we had at hand.

Once the exercise was finished, we proposed that each student should make their own short film in an Instagram Stories format. This is a task that will be carried out by the Visual and Arts teacher and which we will be following up.