It’s hard to remember a not-so-distant past when we weren’t constantly filling spare moments by checking Facebook or Instagram accounts. A generation of smartphone carrying socialites strives for attention through posts and status updates. With “likes” and “favoriting” a personal competitive desire arises; “How many likes can I get on this?”
As an individual participating with social media, I have watched others stop everything they are doing and focus their concentration into recording their experiences to share. This sort of mediation and mobile recording further removes the individual from actual experience. Instead of living through the moment, people try and get the right angle or perfect light for their photo. Has the broad audience of social media become a platform for desperate calls of attention? After scrolling through content, do you really care about what has been posted?
I collect smartphones, frame and hang them on the wall to further mediate the relationship between content and viewer. I collect images from social media sites relating to their hashtags. Each phone pairing consists of one working phone that viewers can scroll through and one phone that displays the hashtag that links these images to Instagram. Seeing these normally handheld objects framed on the wall may allow us to view them anew, to rethink their purposes and their relationship to the viewer.
