Digital Traces
Hong Jet Chua
Social media platforms have ushered in a generation of youth who are engaged in activating an unprecedented amount of screen time, which is a major contributor to the declining mental health in its user base. Pulling back the veneer of functional and efficient UI design of our social media platforms, Digital Traces is an interactive experience that aims to address and raise awareness of the implications of our social media consumption on our health and cultural values. The interactive experience consists of the user navigating a smartphone app that subverts and appropriates the design language of popular platforms to reveal contradictions between the user and platform. The advancement of artificial intelligence and algorithms technology indicate further fragmentation and accelerated use of social media, which reduces the user base that it serves to datamines in which they consume content past their physical capacity. Digital Traces is an attempt to address the dystopian aspects of our social reality, and aid the user in developing a more critical understanding of the exploitation of attention and the impact of social media ubiquity.