Educational Media Reviews Online

Selfless aims to take a look at society's current obsession with social media, selfies, and technology, particularly among today's teenagers. It explores various levels of this from chronicling the life of a teenage girl and her family who live completely off the grid to showcasing the story of a young girl and her experiences with cyberbullying. The documentary also includes interviews from various health and medical experts to provide a holistic view of social media's impacts on today's youth.

This film provides a decent overview of the social and mental impact of social media on teens but is severely lacking in its analysis of these issues. Instead of focusing on the mental health impacts, this film centers on the obsession with selfies and the impact of this on body image in young women. An analysis of body image among teenage girls would definitely be welcome, but this film puts the onus of these issues on women rather than on how patriarchal society has shaped men's mentality. One message from Selfless is that women need to stop posting selfies if they want to be taken seriously by men. This film makes several generalizations like this, is highly focused on the traditional gender binary, and is not sex positive.

In addition to this, there are untrue medical claims made about the impact of technology and social media, one of which is that wifi has a negative physical impact on the body, without any disclaimers present. Due to these concerns, this film is not recommended for use in classrooms or in library collections as it enforces harmful views and stereotypes of young women.

Published and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Anyone can use these reviews, so long as they comply with the terms of the license.