Tuesday 1 November 2016

3rd year.. online comments project

long time no post...just a little update to what I am working on in 3rd year so far.

Well, currently the main thing I am working on is a printmaking project that has started through a fascination with the tone of online commentary, particularly the comments on the Guardian website's Art and Design section in response to artist reviews and articles on certain artists.. honestly it is easy to accidentally peek below the line and get tangled up reading them.. it fascinates me from a social interaction perspective, a psychological one and, It feels like there is an element of  pure Britishness of some of the discourse that I enjoyed.
Some of it is genuinely funny, some is quite mean spirited.

So, I wanted to look at this and think about why people are saying the things they are; Are they trying to appear more intelligent than the writer by using big words and flowery language or is it simply to one up their fellow commenters? Do they want to appear more knowledgeable on the subjects of art or more pious by publicly disparaging someone simply because they are popular? Perhaps all of these reasons and more, either way it really is interesting and there have been studies done by the Guardian as well as independent bodies into the nature of the degradation of online commentary, Where once we had only the weekly published letters to the editor, that were you to be printed you were among a small number, now we have an instant soapbox and perhaps this is why these things so often go wildy off topic. Either way, I find it very interesting so a long term project is the result.

I am working towards a specific way of presenting it that should be quite fun.
It's called "This comment has been deleted"
Here are a few of what I have done so far. 

















Please if you would be so kind, could you fill in my little survey about online comments.
survey here