SOCIAL MEDIA TATTOO PREP

‘Anything we choose to upload, tweet, reblog, favorite, "like", is going into an endless record. One that will be very, very hard to erase…With the touch of a button--you can take down your career, you can take down your boss, you can ruin a relationship--romantic or otherwise. And these things won't go away.

One of the things I tell my clients every single day--it's a lot easier to control the conversation than it is to change it. But in the world of online--it's ten times harder. It's not a speech that will go away after you deliver it--it's one that could be transcribed, uploaded, quoted--for however long the public wants. It'll pop up in search results for a decade, if not far, far longer than that.’ (Fineman, 2014)

My personal way of thinking of the online footprint we all leave behind us is that everything you post online is with you forever – almost like a tattoo. Tornoe (cited by Hue, 2013) explains how majority of posted web content is on a hard drive somewhere in the world. It is almost impossible to remove it once it has been shared, as even when a disk drive is erased it is almost as easy to retrieve, as it was to remove.

My concept that I have created from this information is that the chosen models twitter feed will be exposed all over their body, as if they are branded with whatever they post online. Using makeup to handwrite the tweets works well as a connotation of Twitter's diary-like format, as only small posts of 140 characters can be made – similar to a physical diary. They are short and to the point, which should translate well onto the body when handwritten. I want to refrain from using programs such as Photoshop to embellish all images, as I want to add variety to the outcomes. If every single result has the same polished look them, it will make my project look predictable and too literal to the social media/online topic. Even though this idea is quite literal in itself, I think that it will work well as it is quite abstract and should create an artistic translation, causing the viewer to rethink how much they wish to post online no matter how small and irrelevant it may seem at the time.

FINEMAN. M, 2014. What We Post Online is Forever, and We Need a Reminder [viewed 12 March 2016] Available from: http://www.inc.com/meredith-fineman/what-we-post-online-is-forever-and-we-need-a-reminder.html

HUE. N, 2013. Digital Permanence: What Goes on The Internet Stays On The Internet [viewed 11 March 2016] Available from: http://threesixtyjournalism.org/digitalpermanence