Excuses, Excuses: Digital Story

For this assignment, you will create a Digital Story that dramatizes one of the sneaky excuses for not getting consent online and presents a counter-argument to the excuse.

• Denying the Harm
  • One of the easiest excuses to fall for is denying that something did harm to anyone, or minimizing how much harm was done. Sometimes we do this by comparing it to something that’s worse, so that the thing we did looks better by comparison.
• Justifying the Harm
• One common excuse is to say that you had to do something bad, or that it was okay to do it because it did more good than bad.
  • It’s true that sometimes doing things that are wrong will do more good than harm. For example, during the Civil Rights movement people broke racist laws as a way of showing people that those laws were unfair. But it’s important to make sure that you’re really doing something for a good cause, and not looking for excuses to justify doing something you know is wrong.
• Blaming the Victim
  • Sometimes we don’t just shift responsibility away from ourselves, we actually blame the person who was hurt by what we did. It’s easy to be fooled by this excuse because you can pretend that you didn’t do anything wrong at all.
• Shifting the Responsibility
  • If we can’t find a way to convince ourselves that something is okay,  we may use an excuse to say it isn’t our fault. This can mean either shifting the blame to a specific person, or just finding a reason why we aren’t to blame.

Your Digital Story will have two parts:

• In the first part, you will perform a skit relating to online consent where someone expresses the excuse you were assigned.
• In the second part you will present a counter-argument to the excuse.

Your Digital Story story can relate either to sharing sexts or to other examples of respect and consent online, like those illustrated in the Online Respect Scenarios.

You can use the Story Table handout to plan your digital story.