Social Media and Art

Presentation

Friday 8th of April

One of the corner stones of 21st century is the use of the internet. One of the defining phenomena of the present times reshaping the world as we know it, is the worldwide accessibility to the internet. The lovechild of the World Wide Web is social media. Social media is the collective of online communications channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration. Websites and applications dedicated to forums, microblogging, social networking, social bookmarking, social curation, and wikis are among the different types of social media.

Social Media is not about technology. Social Media is about people, people in our society, people around the world. It even Impacts our online behaviour and our offline behaviour. Social media has three main recognised social platforms be it Facebook, snapchat or Instagram.

Social media is the collective of online communications channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration. Websites and applications dedicated to forums, microblogging, social networking, social bookmarking, social curation, and wikis are among the different types of social media.

The issue of privacy is ubiquitous. With social networking we have a certain control in regards the information we provide. We are currently in a time frame where we are witnesses to these types of artists using the internet as a platform.

Social media is a fascinating new human phenomenon. In 2016 alone, research showed that over 2 billion people have used the Internet across the world. Of those people, nearly 80% have signed into a social networking site in the past year to connect with others, curate their personal images, and share information with people across the virtual universe.

Given these facts, social media has been a growing medium in visual art over the past 20 years. In the 1990s, artists who couldn't find commercial success began sharing their work on early webpages. In 2002, Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen developed "Listening Post," an installation that pulled real-time text from chat rooms, bulletin boards, and online forums, and displayed them across hundreds of small screens. Today, artists regularly tap social media as a way to create a shared experience, crowdsource participants and ideas, and explore the dynamics between the virtual and IRL. Social media has been a growing medium in visual art over the past 20 years. Artists act on Social media by using its subjects as their modern day profiles.

WORKSHOP

Instagram is a widely used image based application used by 200 million worldwide. 8796 photos per second are shared worldwide. We as a group decided seeing as everyone in the group are designers, a proficient workshop on how to successfully use and build a following on Instagram would be extremely beneficial. The workshop started with a debriefing on how to properly tag photos with some generic yet useful hashtags as to broadcast their image to a wider audience. We then proceeded to divided the group into teams of 3. We discussed how to use the lighting available to you at any location and how to use the preset editing system built in to the Instagram application. We left it to to groups to decide what and where to take phots. Interestingly they all choose to take pictures of themselves ‘selfies’. After 20 minutes they returned with their selected photographs. We asked proceeded by showing people established Instagram accounts to demonstrate the different aesthetics utilized by various users. With ‘mayfair’ being the most popular filter used by Instagram users, many opted to apply that filter. We then allowed the group to make their own decisions on how to edit their photo. At the end of the workshop the most successful photo gained 31 likes in 15 minutes which according to the user was a great improvement.