Browse Exhibits (11 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.
YouTube Top Comments
The growth of the Internet and social media has allowed a massive amount of online interaction to occur on a daily basis. Obvious examples of such would be Twitter threads or Snapchat and Instagram stories however, comment sections stand out as the largest mixing pot of online interactivity. On popular social media pages or YouTube channels there can be comments from tens of thousands of individuals that vary greatly in content. Some people self-promote their own pages, others may make an insightful observation, there could be racial slurs or derogatory language, it is truly a mixed bag. However in every comment section there is a diamond in the rough. The top comment.
The concept of a top comment is incredible. One single comment climbing it’s way to the top of a comment section, rising above the many other puns, statements, and shameless plugs to be deemed the top comment. Comment’s find their way to the top for a variety of reasons, but ultimately it is up to the individuals that compose the comment section to “thumbs up” or “heart” a comment to the point of virtual superstardom. These top comments are frequently even funnier than the content the comment is about, and that is the glory of the Internet. Users determine the popularity of a comment through a discrete and unbiased democracy. Compiled here are some of my favorite top comments.
Twitter: A Stream of Consciousness - Covid-19
Twitter, as of November 2019, has taken on a new life, reinvigorated by thousands of users that have taken to the platform to express themselves in the midst of the Coronavirus. Twitter users use their tweets to connect with others during a time when isolation is no longer a safety precaution, but a requirement by law. However, the personal and psychological effects of the pandemic were not always so evident in the tweets of the majority of users and instead seem to have slowly grown and shifted over the months. This change in the tone of the general consensus on twitter is what this exhibit focuses on, using tweets from popular users as well as not to paint a picture of what life was like for people during the Coronavirus pandemic. The tweets range from humorous to deadly serious, covering only a tiny scope of the range of personal expression during such a challenging time in history. A platform like Twitter allows tracking of the changes in the general consensus by tracking dates and the reach that the tweet has- through the likes and retweets! The situation in early 2020 was unprecedented for the general populace and it is interesting to see how people have taken to social media to react to it.
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.
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.
Quotes in Social Media
Common to the social media of today is the rapid dissemination of information. It takes no more than a single click to share a post or retweet a picture. And, among this proliferating landscape of data, visual rhetoric has come to dominate much of the digital discourse in today’s society. One form of visual rhetoric that has gained popularity in recent years is the sharing and retweeting of quotes, often accompanied by imagery to evoke a certain meaning to an audience. Often times these quotes come from scholars of antiquity; other times they come from modern, everyday denizens. Perhaps, more importantly, is how they act as a commentary on the state of affairs of everyday society, speaking to an array of audiences that span from the individual to the world.
Quotes are disseminated through myriad individuals and groups, a product of the mechanisms that enable social media to be… well, social. While there are several groups and communities throughout Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram that post this type of content on a regular basis, the sharing and retweeting of these quotes is done by our families and friends. As a matter of fact, some quotes have such frequent circulation that they have become part of the public domain (like the images on the following pages). Because of their continual circulation, it might be important to observe the messages they are conveying (often recontextualized from original meaning), and how said messages are affecting different audiences.
Trolling: Writing for the Lulz
Common advice on the web advises internet-users against "feeding” (or interacting with) internet trolls, and for (sometimes) good reason. However, this exhibit seeks to understand this peculiar internet-born version of everyday writing. Simply put, trolling is a form of dialogic practical joking wherein the writer (or "troll") seeks to decieve the unsuspecting public into taking their writing as genuine or serious -- no matter how absurd or outrageous the content. This written form of deceitful playacting is motivated by one thing, and one thing primarily: laughing at others’ expense (often stylized as “the lulz”).
While trolling as a rhetorical tactic perhaps pre-dates the internet, the actual term "trolling" is fairly recent. This writing, which is often (but not always) multimodal and metatextual engages in a sort of “game” with the public: the troll assumes a purposefully-absurd persona and spends as long as they possibly can committing to an overly-elaborate fiction. This dedication to an absurd persona usually results in three different outcomes:
- The public is fooled, and takes the troll's words and actions as wholly serious, resulting in a "successful" trolling where the public expresses outrage and offense;
- The public is not fooled, resulting in a "failed" trolling where the public does not express outrage and offense or;
- The public recognizes the troll and begins playing along with them -- thereby becoming trolls themselves.
As a form of everyday writing, trolling remains a fascinating and underexplored form beacause of it's two-sided rhetorical aims. When you're an internet troll, it doesn't matter if you actually believe what you are saying... all that matters is that you fool strangers into thinking that you do. In this way, trolling isn't exactly the same thing as lying, because if a troll is particularly skilled, they may not need to tell a single lie in order to convince an unsuspecting stranger into seeing their words and actions as genuine.
This exhibit will use two different instances of public trolling to explore this phenomenon: the "Storm Area 51" Facebook event, and the #JusticeForBradsWife hashtag campaign.
Instagram: Linking the Physical to the Digital
Instagram has become a part of our everyday lives. Depending on who you are, you may be constantly checking Instagram or some other type of social media. With the amount of users and the different objects that you can take and post, there's a whole world to be seen right from your finger tips. One interesting tag you might find worth visiting? The museum tag.
When we think about museums, we think of them as a physical place that one has to visit. The Museum of Everyday Writing proves that this is not a completely accurate way to think. This exhibit examines the way in which Instagram connects museums from the physical world to the digital one and the effect that those who post about them have on how we perceive them.
Social Media & Celebratory News : Announcing Personal Victories to the World
This exhibit analyzes celebratory news posted on various social media platforms and attempts to understand why we share this information. These particular posts and their connection to the ephemerality of everyday writing is also discussed.
Even though everyday writing is dubbed mundane in nature, it has the potential to make transient moments more concrete. Its presence in the form of social media posts captures those important yet fleeting moments - like the excitement one feels after getting a promotion/new job or even being accepted into their dream school - and memorializes them for both the person experiencing it and for others in their social sphere.
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.