Protest Poster

Artist's Statement

            As much as social media has helped me to reconnect to people around the world, I do have a bone to pick with it. Not just for the actual use of social media in today’s culture, but for the insane amount of venues available to engage in social media. Not only does it feel counterproductive to our ability to actually connect to other individuals, but it is just an annoyance that the success of one good social outlet spawned thousands of imitators trying to snatch its money. So, I decided to use that for my protest poster.

            If you have an axe to grind against something, you need to know your enemy. So I took to the source of the issue, the Internet, and studied about the social media rage. Obviously, social media has been around much longer than we think. Sites like MySpace have been in circulation since the early 2000’s. However, the continued rise of social media sites and the success of Facebook changed the climate into a rougly $2 billion that has increased Internet felonies and distorted dating to make people feel “closer” to people online better than face to face.

            The key thing I wanted to do is give a certain visual layout to the poster. The background is intentionally black and empty to tie into the intentionally red text’s ironic title. The icons are arranged in a neat little order to try and imitate structure, though the gaps and cracks in-between are apparent. The icons are all that is shown for most of the sites represented, since most people are familiar with a site just by the logo alone. This creates an idea of building blocks or pillars if you want to go by the title. Yet there is no base, nothing behind it and no supports around it. It is a system of pillars with a weak foundation.

            I posted this on my Facebook account hoping to discuss this further with other friends. Unfortunately, the post received zero comments. Disheartening perhaps, but perhaps this fuels my idea. People are so used to the use of social media for dating and interaction that they don’t want to agree to dissention. I will still try to gauge opinions on it, but for now I stand alone in discussing it.