Digitally You

At its heart Digitally You is about the relationship between our ‘real’ and ‘digital’ lives. We increasingly present ourselves online as curated ‘selves’ through materials such as photographs, videos, profiles and posts on social media platforms. Our identities and the way we also perhaps even perceive the world has gone through a radical change in the early 21st century.

Charles and Jean are characters who are adrift in a world surrounded by technology. In their increasing isolation they spend more and more time in their digital lives and retreating into a world of fantasy. Through a social network virtual world they are able to adopt avatars and further live their digital dreams. Is the world and platform of Digital You a dating site? A social network site? A virtual world? Or a place all of these digital experience are brought together? Maybe they don’t know themselves or care, it gives them something they need - the opportunity to be their true selves or who they want to be… who they have known they always should have been.

As their avatars cross paths a chain of events is set off and they must face the limits and boundaries of these identities and what they are really searching for. Can they help each other by forming a genuine human connection in this modern digital world of fantasy?

As the internet and social media has become a bigger part of our lives a sub-genre of film has arguably grown around this but it is often presented in science-fiction or much darker territory. Digitally You aims to explore and reflect how we use social media today in our own lives and what this means for our own real and digital identities. In that sense it is a smaller scale ‘street level’ world view of this subject that is focused on the individual and how we use the technology on a daily basis and the impact of this on our sense of self. In a way, our ordinary ‘real’ lives have become ‘extraordinary’ and our identities have grown in scale and complexity since the turn of the century in ways we perhaps don’t always realise. Digitally You aims to explore this aspect of identity we must all now partake, as all of us now must consider in our own lives what is real and who 'the digital you' is in our own lives.