Searching (2018), directed by Aneesh Chaganty, is one of movies that told entirely on computer screens. The story is about father looking for his missing 16-years-old daughter by examine his daughter laptop and social media to find clue where she might be. The movie highlight about the function of social media, which related to our daily life as teenager in social media. There are many gripping things from the movie. First of all, Searching shows as the against the stigma where social media purpose is to impress other people. In spite of that social media become place to escape, especially for teenager in labile condition, where they think no one listen to them in reality. It can be seen how the character of missing girl use social media to get to know new people (or stranger) and share what she feels to her internet friends. In addition to that, it affirms that social media make the user can easily get stalk. Moreover, Searching movie also smoothly warn parents to more aware about their children. Most of parents thought they really know their children while the truth they actually might misunderstand. If we look deeper, other enthralling about Searching is we can see various effect of social media from good one to awful one. (Carissa)
Our main theme is Social Media and our pop culture reference is the movie “Searching”.
It really emphasized on how the use of social media and its effect from the movie. How it’s used differently than most who used it to interact with those we already know in real life, like most teenager uses social media to post lots of interaction that usually will impress people, their fancy lifestyle, their social activity, and their engagement with their family or friends. It’s a very common thing to do that on social media such as Facebook and Instagram where the app focuses more on posting pictures and the like or comment numbers which sort of make those who uses it feel the need to always compete on what’s best to post, who got the most comment or likes. Apparently, in this movie the 2nd leading role or Margot uses social media to escape from the reality where she couldn’t really share her closeness with her dad nor her friends because she didn’t use the social media like how her friends used it. And how she uses it to interact with stranger privately and not sharing them with her friends and family. And from that matter a distance is build between her and her surroundings. (Annisa)
Based from the movie “Searching” we can conclude that social media basically have both positive and negative sides. The positive side is that the use of social media platform can help the dad to find his daughter, when police investigation leads nowhere and leave no clue. In the real life, we can get so much benefit from the positive side of social media, we can use social media to improve our business, for example. By putting an ad on a social media platform, we can get more customer from all around the world. Social media also leads us to get more acquaintance and more friends, like what happened in the “Searching: movie. We can also fulfill our everyday needs by simply ordering it from a social media platform. Despite all the positiveness that social media could offer us, there are also some disadvantage and harm that social media cause. From the movie “Searching”, the use of social media causes the missing case of the daughter. Whereas in the real life, there’s a lot of abduction case nowadays where it all started from social media, even the use of social media could also lead to a suicide, where the victims feel very depressed because of cyber bullying. (Yollanda)
We have mentioned the effects of social media, on the positive and negative sides, but what we should highlight is that from this movie we can also use social media to help us. In this case, in the movie, the dad looked up all his daughter’s social media activities and her use of it helped him find the reasons for his daughter’s case and helped him locate his daughter. If it is not because of the use of the social media platform by his daughter, he might have a harder time than he already had in terms of locating his daughter. But, not to forget, her use of this platform is also the cause of her missing case, the strangers that are all over the internet and in the social media platforms can be dangerous, simply because you can never really know who they truly are and what kind of a person they are.
In conclusion, everything always has good and bad effects on our lives, especially social media, but we should not be scared of it. What we should do instead is to use it wisely and don’t ever let social media creates a distance between yourself and loved ones or anyone that is already close to you. Other than that, we think that this movie is quite relatable to our daily life because of the widely use of social media. ( Luthfia )