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Social media, in all its platforms has grown and taken over within the last decade. Millennial’s have grown up with instant messages and uploads as a normal part of life.
They have learnt that to be “liked” or “followed” is a form of validation for themselves and it represents who they are. IHeart’s mural is a perfect representation of how our society has developed and become exactly this. His work is simple, a crying toddler upset at his lack of follows, comments or likes on the platform Instagram.
Particularly in the western and developed world, the orange speech bubble with a heart, head or smaller bubble is all too familiar. It’s the sign of approval, the sign of someone liking your post and, thereby liking you, which is more than just a ‘want’ for people but rather a ‘need’.
But why does this resonate so much with us, most often a young child isn’t throwing a tantrum as illustrated by IHeart because of Instagram. Rather IHeart is commenting on how within us as a society, our internal distress can be so child like. Upset by the mundane, saddened by something which doesn’t physically exist. Instagram feeds our need for validation and when it isn’t there, or not fast enough or not by enough people, there can be a feeling of despair and upset. People have a need to feel cool or trendy, to be approved by as many people as possible.
As explained in “The Concept of Cool” it is said that “cool is about being in the know” It is about you keeping up with what society is following and their values at the current time, or about making sure that the rest of society see’s you as this ideal person. People are now making their lives out of Instagram, this media platform has been merged into our consumerist culture. Where the program was originally seen as an image sharing platform between friends, it has now taken over and become one of the leading marketing and advertisement platforms available.
People produce these fake images, pretend their lives are something they aren’t, something that they believe people want to see and believe, sell themselves and their life as a form of a product that is on trend. What they do everyone else soon wants to do. Instagram has grown to be about the “consumption of performance”. It is an act that can be bought, one that people will do anything to have in their possession even if the their reality falls short of the performance they have seen and idolised. It is because as Deighton puts it, “the symbolic products are used as props in performances enacted to influence others”. Instagram is there to distinguish what is cool. It sells to our needs for approval. It supports our vanity and our desire to appear better off than we really are.
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// Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism And Consumer Society”, The anti-aesthetic : essays on postmodern culture (1983): 111-125.
//Clive Nancarrow, Pamela Nancarrow and Julie Page, “An Analysis Of The Concept Of Cool”, Academic Papers 1,4 (2001).p313 -314
// “LOOK: Banksy – This Vancouver Artist”. The Huffington Post. Last modified 2017. Accessed April 5, 2017. http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2014/03/05/banksy-vancouver-street-artist-iheart_n_4906494.html.
Documenting Design 
The role social media plays in our lives is a very interesting topic! It is also a little frightening how much value we place on our online presence. The rising prevalence of social media has allowed for a mobility of visual culture and for an increasingly commercial culture to infiltrate every facet of our lives. The growth of this design movement is an aesthetic response to modernism. It is interesting to look at how power can shift from the consumer to the producer and vice versa. Designers must consider the public’s opinion when working; is this because the designer hold power of the consumer or the consumer holds power over the designer?
Design plays a key role in shifting the balance of power between consumers and producers. It is the way design is employed, that is the deciding factor on what the consumer becomes and the role they play. Design can make a consumer feel as if they are in control while simultaneously masking hidden intentions of producers. The relationship between looking and power is forever manifesting the capitalist myth of consumer independence and the control it has over identity.
The relationships between how we are viewed and how we view society can be found by looking at the role design plays in creating our surroundings. Design is a tool used to manipulate, it can play with our wants and twist them so they are unrecognisable. We are constantly caught up in surface appearances. A currency has been placed on the importance of looks and can be used to make absolute assertions, regarding the nature of society, on how consumers interact with their surroundings
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