Free art piece idea #40
This one’s called “A personal gesture to ease our collective hearts”.
In an article for the New York Times, Arthur C. Brooks writes:
And then there’s social media. Today, each of us can build a personal little fan base, thanks to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like. We can broadcast the details of our lives to friends and strangers in an astonishingly efficient way. That’s good for staying in touch with friends, but it also puts a minor form of fame-seeking within each person’s reach. And several studies show that it can make us unhappy.
It makes sense. What do you post to Facebook? Pictures of yourself yelling at your kids, or having a hard time at work? No, you post smiling photos of a hiking trip with friends. You build a fake life — or at least an incomplete one — and share it. Furthermore, you consume almost exclusively the fake lives of your social media “friends.” Unless you are extraordinarily self-aware, how could it not make you feel worse to spend part of your time pretending to be happier than you are, and the other part of your time seeing how much happier others seem to be than you?
His writing echoes The School of Life’s wise depiction of social media as a distortion tool of the live’s of others and a contributor to personal anxiety. In this art piece, the executor is to publish pictures and posts about their negative feelings on social media. Here is one example:
I feel clueless today. Several months ago I shared how one of my articles had been widely shared and how I had my life direction all “figured out” but today it seems as if nothing makes sense. I wanted to share that with you, friends.
Of course, we usually unfollow people who share negative emotions but written in a compassionate, self-aware and vulnerable manner, these posts can be liberating to both the author and the reader. A mechanism promoting others doing the same action can also be put in place by the executor.
