Vieroslava Dyson

What if The Great Gatsby characters lived in the 21st century? How would they express their desires, secrets, and illusions online?
In this creative classroom project, students bring F. Scott Fitzgerald’s timeless characters to life by designing fictional social media profiles that reflect their personalities, relationships, and moral complexities.

This activity deepens analytical reading skills, encourages creative writing, and strengthens digital literacy—all while making classic literature come alive.

💡 The Project at a Glance

Students analyzed The Great Gatsby through a modern lens.
Each group created a social media profile for a chosen character—complete with bios, posts, images, hashtags, and interactions with other characters.

The goal?
To understand each character’s motivations, relationships, and contradictions by imagining how they’d present themselves online.

By stepping into the digital shoes of Fitzgerald’s characters, students discover how timeless themes—wealth, love, illusion, and morality—can be expressed in today’s virtual world.

As students scroll through Gatsby’s glamorous posts and Daisy’s filtered melancholy, they see that beneath the hashtags and glitz lies the same question Fitzgerald posed a century ago:

What is the cost of chasing the American Dream?

In The Great Gatsby, every character performs a version of themselves—carefully constructed, polished, and projected outward to be admired. Through this project, students begin to recognize that these performances aren’t confined to the 1920s. The way Gatsby hosts parties to be noticed isn’t so different from how modern influencers post for validation. By transforming these literary characters into digital personas, students are challenged to think critically about appearance versus reality, authenticity versus performance, and the illusion of connection. The social media profiles become more than creative assignments—they’re mirrors reflecting how identity is shaped, edited, and consumed, both then and now.