Check-in, Following, Participating?
The Matter of Architecture in the Age of Social Media
In this short video based on the methodology of détournement, Xing (Dominic) Chen discusses the current impact of mobile electronic devices and social media on public space and human behavior. Dominic uses The Society of Spectacle by Guy Debord as a theoretical framework, along with the narrative of the brief development history of visual electronic communication. Dominic is a current Master of Research in Architecture student at the Royal College of Art.
The development of new media based on information and communication technology (ICT) has produced more agility and ability concerning when, where, and how we connect with others or spaces. This is affecting the definition, representation, perception, and experience of public spaces. Recently, the descriptive discourse about ICT seems to be gradually replaced by the term social media, because of its capability to enable audiences to actively participate in the production of media content.
In the past 20 years, smartphone-based social media apps have continued to emerge, such as Facebook(2004), Weibo(2009), Instagram(2010), and Xiaohongshu(2013), et cetera. According to reports, more than 4.20 billion users were using social media worldwide in 2021, accounting for 53% of the global total (Datareportal, 2021). Moreover, the average time daily use of social media increased from approximately 1.51 hours in 2015 to 2.25 hours in 2021 (Datareportal, 2021).
As the scholar elucidates that people are immersed in a new world mediated by ICT, in which unprecedented knowledge transfer is being witnessed by the emerging digital generation, while this process is considered barely resisted, our subjectivity is deeply shaped in the world reconstructed by social media (Kroker, 2014).
The highly visual nature of social media encourages people to publish selected images of their everyday practices, seeking spatial backgrounds for specific aesthetic requirements. This in turn affects how and where they move through the city. In this scenario, the phenomenon of Instagrammable public spaces actively encourages the public spreading of spatial images, creating colorful, novel, and attractive spatial backdrops popular among social media users.
Although it is indeed fascinating that the popularity of the built environment shifts beyond its primary function, we are witnessing the reduction of public spaces in cities into two-dimensional backgrounds when that space is evaluated only by its fragmented, framed, and edited appearance on social media. One has to ask, where will this lead us？
