I decided to explore:

Issue: Social Media and Identity Projection – social media ‘bullshit’

Increased addiction to social media is a growing concern amongst society as it inhibits productivity. Indeed it is estimated during a working day ¼ of the time is spent browsing on non-work related social media activities (website). The addiction to social media is linked to compulsive activities like cocaine addiction. The brain’s response to social media is a reward reaction, maintaining ones social reputation, increasing the nucleus accumbens when used. Nir Eyal, author of the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products suggested that the addiction stems from “a trigger, such as loneliness, boredom, or stress; an action, such as logging in to Facebook; an unpredictable or variable reward.” Eyal suggests that Facebook and other forms of social media are a way of projecting an identity to help build social status, as a result one constantly compares themselves to others even resulting in depression.

A German study (website) showed that the game of ‘liking’ stemmed the social addiction. Social Media is often used to flaunt success, posting photos of happiness and physical attractiveness, thus making one feel more negative about themself – in fact the study revealed that the longer college students spent on facebook the worst they felt about themselves. In fact, when questioning peers they admitted to judging people upon their social media sites, especially when house hunting for university. Social media now appears to construct our identities, worryingly distorting the truth about one’s life and personality. Raf Simons rightly described social media as ‘bullshit’ with feeds becoming clogged up with pointless jargon to appear cool. Furthermore in terms of culture, over sharing takes away from the value of work such as fashion collections when shows are streamed to everyone. Social media is lowering the value of humanity.

I opted to create a campaign inspired by i-D magazine changing it to i-Dk, reflecting social media slang used for ‘I dont know’. The reasoning for the name ‘I dont’ know’ was to reflect the number of false unknown identities on social media, and how people even portray a fake personal of themselves – thus they could say ‘I don’t know myself’. I experimented with creating a series of posters of the same person using different social media effect such as snapchat, showing how the person can be seen as ‘unknown’ on Social Media as their identity can visually change. I used myself as a parody to satirize the selfie in order to mock the value and posing portrayed on social media.

Furthermore, within the campaign I created an I. D Badge, Stickers and T-Shirt. The I-D badge emphasised the theme of identity, and alluded to the idea of the need for one to have a social media I-d badge as they can look so different. The Stickers were to be collected in a series of 3 with different fragments of the face to build up 3 different personas of one person, again emphasising how people can have different and unknown identities on social media. The t-shirt, acted as a cover up with a front hood, showing how one can be unknown on social media by portraying a false outer alter-ego but being different on the inside. I used mirror like shiny fabric to allude to a mirror to emphasise the idea of identity, and emphasis on the exterior persona achieved on social media – but not actually showing the real person underneath. I used sheer organza fabric to show that it is just a section of their identity, and is literally transparent – it is not the real full person. It also had part of the identity on the back, again emphasizing that social media is not the full identity at face value.