#InstaRoadTrip2016
How To Travel The World Without Ever Leaving Home
From Tumblr to Twitter, and Instagram Stories to Snapchat Memories, myriad platforms exist for people to share their lives with the world. You and I are literally some of the first humans to live in a time where almost anyone with a phone can channel their inner artist and showcase their creativity to the planet.
But how many of these artists tell authentic stories? And where is the line drawn between art, and artificiality?
This is the story of #InstaRoadTrip2016, a journey documented on Instagram by writer and self-proclaimed artist Gideon Jacobs. Instagram, as you likely know, is a massively popular online photo sharing platform, where some 500 million global users share photos and videos with friends, family, and just as often, the rest of the world.
Jacobs’s spontaneous Instagram project was a digital attempt to imitate a young man setting out on a road trip from New York City to California. The narrative consists of a collection of interactions that Jacobs deemed worthy of “rescuing from oblivion” to create a #KodakMoment. The trip adopted the haphazard nature of real life adventures, and contained photographs with random thoughts inspired by Jacobs’ location.
#InstaRoadTrip2016 was intriguing for the way it created the illusion of travel. That’s right — despite Jacobs not even owning a car, he took us on (for?) a ride composed of geotagged photos from places he’d never been, detailing the essence of sights he’d never seen.
This raises an interesting question: as the quality and breadth of online technologies improve, will physical travel become just a hobby, or something traditionalists do while the rest of us travel the world from the comfort of our own homes? Put a different way: if a fake roadtrip composed of pictures and text is enough to entertain us, will quality VR see strap into our couches never to get up again?
Jacobs hoped the project would “highlight the blurry line between fact and fiction in an era when many use social media to author their lives.” He “documented” this fictional trip to make a point: that what people post online is a compromise between their actual life, and their desired one. The project tricked its audience into believing that their involvement was tangential, when really they experienced exactly what Jacobs did.
To be fair though, Jacobs didn’t deceive anyone outright; his disclaimer states the account is a parody of the masses. His whole Instagram account, in fact, is a collection of experimental storytelling projects.
Telling stories this way — through photo sharing and social media — is intriguing to say the least. The assumption of truth in photography — every Instagram account is the story of it’s user’s life, right? — can help lower barriers, connect people, and share powerful messages. A city kid capturing the rhythm of his fast-paced life in photographs will change a small town kid’s perspective. The plight of an overweight woman facing a fat-shaming world, told through her snapshots, ignites dialogue around social intolerance. The denominator here is the format; namely, the elegance of the Instagram platform enables the overlooked to take center stage.
On the flipside, can we call a cut-and-paste photo book with new captions literature? Is #InstaRoadTrip2016 art, really? Social networking allows us to tell the stories of our lives to anyone who follows us — why else would the term “the selfie generation” develop? But we’re all guilty of “authoring” the truth to a point, aren’t we? On a daily basis we don’t curate, annotate and infatuate to the extent that Jacobs did, perhaps, but where do we draw the line? And what does this say about the life stories that we write, tell, and share?
Contemporary artists are creating a potential host of new jobs making social media their canvas. Imagine social media actors, where a single story is told through the interaction of multiple accounts. Cliché narratives — think innocent girl goes to college, discovers drugs, alcohol, etc — would take on a new life if followers watched it unfold from a variety of vantage points. This intersection of technology and art might be the world’s introduction to the future of storytelling.
Do you know of any works of art that have borrowed from others’s social media posts? Have you ever thought about creating something that draws from online content, like social networks, messenger apps, or something more meta? Let us know in the response section, we’d love to hear from you!
Enjoy!
This week Woven is supported by Inkitt, the first data-driven book publisher and a fast-growing online community for emerging writers. Check out their writing contests (free to enter) and their resources for writers.
