Browse Exhibits (4 total)

Examining "Finsta" Accounts as the Modern Day Diary: Everyday Writing in the Digital Age

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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.

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Contextualizing Art Through Everyday Writing

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Most people are familiar with the saying “a picture is with a thousand words,” and while this may be true, sometimes a little more context is needed to evoke a complete understanding of a piece of art. Everyday writing can thus be used to provide this context, and this exhibit explores the ways in which people have used everyday writing in this manner. 

The importance of establishing context in both everyday writing and in art, lies in its ability to stimulate knowledge creation. In her article titled “Writing is a Knowledge-Making Activity,” Heidi Estrem uses a definition of writing which asserts that writing is “an activity undertaken to bring new understandings,” (Estrem 19). It is about “mulling over a problem, thinking with others, and exploring new ideas or bringing disparate ideas together,” (Estrem, 19). This concept of bringing new understandings and bringing disparate ideas together are seen within the interrelationship of art and everyday writing in this exhibit.

In the next few pages, a relationship between art, everyday writing, and materiality will also be established, as the materiality of a work is just as important to its context as any other component. In other words, I will be taking a scenic/contextual approach to analyzing these artifacts, where “writing is not only words on the page, but also concerns the mechanisms for production,” (Porter 386). The methods by which the creator of these artifacts composed both the artwork and writing of their piece attests to the purpose, audience, and overall meaning of the composition. The materiality also portrays the character of the creator while defining the composition’s intimacy and capacity for interaction, performing both as “an expression of the self and a social activity,” (Yancey, 164).  

The ontological view of writing maintains the “impossibility of ‘contextless’ writing,” (Lillis, 80), and this is a view I choose to uphold in this exhibit. The meaning of any composition is heavily dependent on its context, an idea I will further explore in the pages to come. 

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Message Boards: Facilitating Conversation

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Three roommates. Three distinct lives. Three different schedules. One message board to keep them connected. 

What might sound like a failed reboot of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants actually offers an interesting viewpoint of the subject of everyday writing and how it can facilitate conversation. 

In college, everyone has their own class schedule, homework, internships, jobs, etc. So much of a college student's life revolves around their schedule, and no one's is exactly the same. For me and my two roommates, this means that we are very rarely all together in the townhouse we share. Despite having been friends since freshman year, our separate lives often pull us in different directions, making it difficult to really connect with each other like we once did. 

Enter a message board from Target. At first it was merely decoration, but as time went on, we began to use it for a lot more than that. Now we use it to communicate plans to one another, to congratulate each other on our various accomplishments, and to offer messages we might not be able to give in person. This simple act of everyday writing doesn't make us necessarily closer, but, it does keep us communicating in a way that feels personal.

This exhibit depicts our messages to one another, more than that though, it demonstrates how everyday writing is used to facilitate conversations between people. Having been to many a college party in my day, I've seen these message boards in a lot of other apartments, so I'd only assume some of them might be similar to our own. 

In the busy lives we lead as college students, something like a message board can help us slow down and actually put some thought into what we'd like to say to those who view it. It is a form of everyday writing that demonstrates a way for people to communicate without direct contact. A way to join people into conversation in unconventional ways.

When we engage with a message board, or really, with any form of everyday writing, we are really engaging in a greater conversation. This conversation can be with the creator, with those who have added to the original idea, or with the many others who view the everyday writing over time. It is this factor that makes a message board important in the grand scheme of everyday writing as a whole.

A message board isn't only important for college students though. Any sort of message board where people can not only put their own ideas, but can respond to other people's ideas is a great tool for communication in the world beyond my personal small scope of life as a college student. 

Within the scope of everyday writing, message boards, dry erase boards, chalk boards; they all accomplish the same thing. Unlike when people write their ideas on walls, or etch them into public surfaces, a board allows for easier communication to flow between contributors. Although, it is also not without certain constraints that don't affect other mediums of everyday writing. For example, with a chalk or dry erase board, messages can be erased, never to be written the exact same way again. This isn't something that would be a problem with more permanent forms of everyday writing.

Even with this constraint though, I think the ease of use for the aforementioned boards make it easy to express one's opinions at the liberty of erasing or rearranging letters. This flexibility allows for more honest, open conversation because the creator might feel free to say what they need to say without fear of having to keep their message there forever. 

In our internet age, if we post something on the internet, it stays there forever. Even if we delete it, there is an archive of our word somewhere. I think the simplicity of a message board in our day and age is important. By using something that can be altered with the flow of time and the changing of ideas, it is easier for us to express ourselves. And with the nature of message boards allowing contributors to openly interact with one another, they provide a way to communicate that is much different from other modes of everyday writing we might encounter more often. 

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________ Was Here!

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This exhibit focuses on the printed names seen on sidewalks, desks, walls, and anywhere and everywhere else. The exhibit is designed to take a closer look at the nuances of these namesthe reasoning behind their placement, their functionalityand examine how and why people are so inclined to mark their names anywhere at all.

This exhibit will also highlight paired couple names and initials, marking their significance as tools for permanent (or semi-permanent, depending on where the couple decided to place their names) expressions of love.

The action of tagging names can also be viewed as a way of marking presence or ownership, and both ideas are emphasized within this exhibit. These concepts, along with legality, all factor into the effect name-writing has on those who participate and studying them helps to understand why name-writing is so common and so overlooked as significant instances of everyday writing.