Our online identities are policed at multiple levels: the state, the corporate, the community and the self. This piece collects and showcases ideas that have not gone through these filtration processes.
By inviting contributors to enter their own anonymous submission via a keyboard in a physical location, Anti-Social Media asks participants to investigate how they share content over modern social networks like Facebook or Twitter.
It aims to encourage social media users to consider how they formulate content to be distributed in the digital realm, and to what extent they adhere to the expectations of social media.
The piece was also created to foreground a concern over whether adhering to these “social media norms” creates a feedback loop, subconsciously influencing the way in which users conduct their lives and thoughts in order to better curate an existence designed for a digital gallery.
See submissions from the keyboard at antisocialart.co.uk. The website for Anti-Social media was available 2014-2018.
The keyboard is mounted on a metal stand and runs into a Raspberry Pi. To allow easy trouble shooting, the Pi is only used to load a remote PHP website on boot and to send signals to the vibration motor mounted underneath the keyboard when someone types a letter.
Javascript is used to monitor keyboard inputs, and will automatically submit and clear the form when the keyboard is left ideal for 15 seconds.
Anti-Social Media was exhibited at the DRHA 2014 conference (Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts). It was on displays 31 August 2014 – 3 September 2014.