How would it look if we took posting on our Facebook walls out of the digital realm and brought it into the physical world. Where would we post? Would we even post at all? I chose to explore the concept of posting on a wall as we do on Facebook by taking it out of its usual context and placing it in a context where it would come off absurd looking. We post on our digital walls so regularly that we don’t always stop to think about how much privacy we actually have online or just how permanent that data could be, or indeed the narcissism involved in updating our status, or “checking in”. Tim Soutphommasane believes that
“the creeping influence of social media, impels us, however insidiously, to believe that nothing is validated as reality until it is either put into a status update or tweet.” (para. 8, T. Soutphommasane, 2012)
He thinks that social media has caused us to redraw the lines between our private and public lives, so that almost everything becomes public, even if just to close friends. (T. Soutphommasane, 2012)
And in the spirit of the moment, I put on here one of my posts that didn’t really need to be posted, as well as a shot from the clip.
My stop motion clip shows the craziness of living our lives online to such an extent that we make lunch dates with others by posting to them. The clip shows two women in the city who have a conversation by “posting” messages to each other on the side of a physical “wall”, even though texts or phoning each other would be better suited to the topic of conversation, that of setting up a lunch date. As they post, members of the public walk by, some pay no attention to what is going on while others slow down slightly to read and observe as they walk by, thus illustrating that no conversation is ever truly private when broadcast via social media channels. The clip also shows how social media has redefined the idea of what a wall is used for to a certain extent, so we end up with perhaps a “new way of seeing” what a wall can be used for, although, as Rob Kelly said in his piece Urban Sprawl, “People have been posting things on other people’s walls before social media erupted and they haven’t stopped yet”. (para. 5, R. Kelly, 2012). Things such as posters, graffiti, tags and even poetry. http://www.flickr.com/photos/christopherdewolf/334744642/
References:
Kelly, R. (23 April 2012). Urban Sprawl. Salient. Retrieved from http://www.salient.org.nz/arts/urban-sprawl
Soutphommasane, T. (21 May 2012). A moderate lament for the imminent passing of privacy. The Age.. Retrieved from http://theage.com.au