For our group’s first media entry of Praxis 3, we wanted to focus on the turbulent direction of our society’s practice of censorship, exploring the possibility of a transformation from silencing select words into a complete rewriting of false narratives. With Trump’s recent attempts to ban TikTok, as well as various social media platforms’ suspension of accounts who discuss the failures of various government institutes (such as BLM protests and police brutality and sexual assault and the victim blaming culture within law enforcement), we wanted to approach the dystopian world we created from an anecdotal perspective. As we realized that no matter how many research resources we explore, one of the best ways to explain the consequences of society’s choices on the people is speaking from personal experience. Our aim was to highlight the importance of upholding the principle of free speech, which can take shape in several forms and is monumental for societal functionality—from voicing minority concerns to critiquing government policies. Furthermore, we wanted to demonstrate how the lack of a love ethic is fundamentally hurtful to society, as we realized that lacking difference does not allow us to understand and narrow the divide between us, instead pushing us further apart. In the dystopia we created where all thought must be the same and must follow the government’s agenda, from the surface it seems that by eliminating different opinions and forcing us to live and act the same, that would erase any of the issues that cause fighting in today’s political and social climate, but ironically, this homogenous environment instead creates an atmosphere of distrust, fear, and depression that makes any attempt at a love ethic impossible.   

We decided to have the foundation of our project rooted in the toxic culture that surrounds sexual assault, which perpetuates the stigma behind it and continually invalidates victim experiences. By creating a gradual dystopia of increased censorship, we wanted to reimagine multiple versions of the same story through the growing control over our freedom of speech.