First Published Tuesday, 7th October, 2008.

About Year Dot

Year Dot is a Channel 4 social media experiment which can be followed through My Space, television and the Year Dot wesbite. It showcases 15 teenagers through a crucial period of their life, their ‘year dot’. The website has daily video diaries and blogs and regular interviews featuring professionally-shot footage. The television series comprises three blocks of 30-minute documentaries to be broadcast over the course of the year.

Year Dot is social networking with a positive spin, offering an exciting and refreshing reinvention of adolescent representation in the media. It focuses on young adults with a dream and their motivated attitude, quashing the idea of the hapless hoodie on the street.

Year Dot hopes to offer us positive role models and hope for the future.

Jamal is a reformed teen who uses social media for the positive, breaks the stereotype of urban youth culture in his endeavours to support his young family and local community.

Tom Mursell highlights the pressures and difficulties felt by adolescents faced with the dilemma of higher education. Tom’s video diary showcases his endeavour to create a business called notgoingtouni aimed at adolescents who are unsure on what to do next after school or college.

Our youngest NAS Councillor is a participant

Josh Muggleton is a 19-year-old with Asperger syndrome who will be using social media to help him through his first year at university.

Badly bullied and misunderstood at school, Josh has been sharing his experiences to help individuals and families affected by autism in his role as The National Autistic Society’s youngest National Councillor. He has been campaigning with the charity to improve education for children with autism for some time, including speaking at the House of Commons and meeting the Children’s Commissioner.

Josh was signed off school with anxiety and depression but after getting the right support at a college for people with autism, has just passed his A levels. He will study psychology at university, so he can help people with autism and other conditions in the future.

Josh hopes that Year Dot will let people see what life is really like with Asperger syndrome, the pros, the cons, but most importantly, that ‘life with Asperger syndome isn’t impossible and doesn’t have to limit what we achieve’.

Josh’s first programme went out on Wednesday 1 October at 11.25 and he should be on again on Friday 2 October.

Related resources

External links

• Year Dot

Source: http://www.nas.org.uk/nas/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=253&a=17583