Browse Exhibits (7 total)
Does Size Matter?
While it is known that social media has become increasingly popular in todays day in age, it has also gradually affected our ideas of everyday writing and altered the way we view it. The need for a lengthy text is no longer necessary, we now can read a short and to the point Instagram caption or a 150 character allotted tweet/comment. I want to further explore this theory of the affect that social media has on our idea of everyday writing. Does the text lose its gravity or meaning if it is shorter? Does utilizing a social platform and imagery take away from the purpose of the writing? I will be exploring these questions through my artifacts.
Examining "Finsta" Accounts as the Modern Day Diary: Everyday Writing in the Digital Age
This exhibit aims to examine everyday writing in the digital age. Social media is increasingly being utilized in a diary-like manner and private accounts are a popular way to express and archive one's thoughts. Over the last 5 years, many users of Instagram have created "fake" (otherwise described as private) accounts where they can be more selective with their followers and content. Many people began using "fake" accounts (also known as "finsta" accounts) to post more intimate accounts of their lives to a more select group of individuals. The increasing popularity of such a phenomenon brings to light many questions about everyday writing in the digital age. When considering how "finsta" accounts function as a new age diary and form of digital everyday writing, it is important to explore the way that elements like text, images, and the promise of privacy define this new form. As a scholar of rhetoric and composition (with interests specifically in visual and digital rhetoric), I have decided to examine "finsta" accounts as new-age diaries. The exhibit attempts to explain why "finsta" posts are everyday writing in addition to explaining how text, images, and privacy settings shape and impact the form.
"Finsta" accounts are a new and modern form of everyday writing. Emerging onto the social platform late in 2011, "finsta" accounts were a concept that invited users to engage in more private and personal posting on social media. "Finsta" accounts presented themselves as an alternative digital space where the user could maintain more control over the audience and their posts. For many people, the concept of "finsta" accounts is inviting. The form offers more privacy because of the user's ability to be more selective with who follows the account, what the profile picture is, what the username is, what the biography states, and what type of content is posted. "Finsta" accounts are digital spaces where users can post intimate details about their lives that are vastly different (and more honest) than their public persona. Additionally, they can market such posts to a more selective audience as a way to maintain the intimate and personal nature of the posts. As the form became increasingly popular, it was only natural that people saw the "finsta" form as an invitation to a space where diary-like entries could be posted and only the most inner-circle of a person's friend/family group could access them. Soon after their advent, people were using "finsta" accounts to post diary-like content that gave updates on their lives, their emotional states, their hidden interests, and more.
The Many Faces of Instagram
Since its conception in 2010, Instagram has evolved into a multifaceted medium in which its users can either maintain a private profile for the eyes of close friends or become a social media influencers and gain popularity. Some post their artwork while others write captions containing links to their music, both with the intention of gaining support from their followers. Celebrities and renowned corporations have taken to the platform in order to connect with potential customers through promotional advertising. What was once a platform that restricted its users to a single square-framed photo per post has become a space filled with direct messages, videos, stories, live videos, multiple pictures per post, and promotional advertisements. This noticeable growth on the platform attracted various kinds of posts to present itself on the app, even coming down to the approaches used for each post. This exhibit will showcase some of the different ways everyday writing is applied on Instagram while focusing on the manner of posts based on the user.
Instagram as Reflection: Janet Martinez's Poems
This exhibit displays a series of Instagram posts created by Janet Martinez. Although she has been writing handwritten poems since she was a child, she uses Instagram primarily to store, share, and save her content. Some of her work has been created and posted from her notes, others were placed into an app to create graphics with the text, and some have been pictures of other materials and texts that she's connected with. As a child, Janet was fascinated with nursery rhymes and believes it has been a foundation for her love of poetry. She loved the combination of music, rhythm, and rhyme. eventually found herself creating music and poems on her own.
After reading through her work, I will analyze the way that everyday writing acts as a form of sense-making and reflection with her topics of identity, culture, and relationships. This exhibit also celebrates the creative freedom that comes with social media and everyday writing.
Travel Logs: A Practice of Reflection
Travel logs are written reflections of travel experiences. Each author chooses to focus on different aspects of travel – the food or the people, the lessons or challenges. They also make choices about when and how they reflect on their travel. Some keep daily logs and others choose to reflect weeks, months, or even years after their trips. This collection, which features one handwritten travel log and two digital social media logs, demonstrates the existence of travel logs in various modes and mediums. Each log and platform engages memory in different ways, some immediate and some reflective in nature. Similarly, their awareness of audience differs significantly and impacts the information recorded and the style used.
Documenting Backpacking through Instagram
These artifacts come from Jessica "Dixie" Mills Instagram at @homemadewanderlust. Mills is an avid wilderness backpacker and uses her Instagram to document her travel experiences to share with her community.
As she embarks on different backpacking expeditions, she develops "series" of posts that illustrate her trips through both photography and written captions. This exhibit focuses on her series of photos on through-hiking the Continental Divide Trail. While she shares a variety of content with her followers, many of her posts categorize into photos of her expedition team, photos of herself, landscape photography, and macrophotography. Utilizing different visuals helps enhance her written captions by portraying the sensations she felt while hiking the trail, and this exhibit describes these methods in more detail.
Obsessed with Our Pets
If you go onto basically any part of the web, you will see that most web users are pretty obsessed with animals, and in particular cute pets. This permeates most aspects of web culture, but is especially obvious on sites like YouTube with its millions of cat videos and in memes. However, there has been a relatively recent trend where users create social networking sites dedicated to and used for/”by” people’s pets; this trend is especially prevalent on Instagram, where the platform focuses more on the visual content (aka a cute video of a cat or dog), with the written content being secondary via captions, hashtags, and comments. These sites tend to be light-hearted and fun, and can be seen both in celebrities (particularly YouTube personalities, it seems) and non-celebrities. That is to say, anyone can create and enjoy pet accounts on social media, and they can be purely used for the person to show the animal and their lives with little in mind beyond a sort of diary structure, or they can try to build the account up and get followers (primarily through networking and the use of hashtags) and potentially even end up creating a following significant enough to earn money or sponsorships in exchange for being featured on the account. Most accounts that are not tied to a celebrity name tend to circulate just the same as the owner’s personal account, but because of the way the internet loves adorable animals some accounts can grow to significantly exceed the owner’s own following.
These accounts tend to have certain features that depending on how the account is being used, including the use of specific hashtags that are aimed at expanding the audience beyond the creators personal network, using captions that either verbalize the animals “thoughts” or in some way act as though the animal is the one composing and curating the account, and of course, the pictures used are always adorable and capture the personality of the animal (whether they are spontaneous or staged is another question). However, there are some that also break from those loose conventions and act more as a public scrapbook or photo diary than as an interactive account. Most interaction by other users primarily consist of various ways of saying “Aw, so cute” or “This animal is ridiculous;” the users react to the animal similarly to if they were in person, but the feedback is (mostly) directed toward the owner.