STONE

In Shitposting On Main I attempt to navigate the absurd and ridiculous nature of the internet itself, specifically social media. I find it hard to take myself or others seriously when talking about the internet because of the useless, funny, garbage pile of content it creates. While I do find myself in the seriously damaging parts of the internet as well, it’s hard to find any place in the internet not touched by the nihilist, dark humor that is so common in my generation. Growing up on the internet is hard, using it is brain rotting, but at the same time it’s all kind of fun, and ridiculous, and stupid, and exhausting, but overall, it’s a place where a bunch of kids get together to laugh and make fun of everything. Seriously, nothing is safe. I don’t think it’s a good place. I don’t think it’s somewhere young children should spend a lot of time, and it is a powerful and dangerous weapon. But also, in the short break I took while writing this to browse Tik Tok for inspiration, I came across a video captioned “the feminine urge to put raw spaghetti thru my nipple piercings and take a hot shower to see if it cooks”. The internet is human innovation at its finest, and we are stupid.

Ultimately, my work took the form it did in an attempt to replicate the visual imagery of memes, while exploring different tropes common on social media. There is only one figure that is not me represented in the collages, mirroring the often self-centered act of posting to social media. In order to create these collages, I combined a photo from my camera, and stills from vlogs created on my phone while shooting. Many of the tropes represented come from vlogging, a popular YouTube video format, but some of the more abstracted, odd ones like Cooking Thirst Trap are commonplace on Tik Tok. In each, a small part of myself is represented, something altered and manipulated for the internet’s enjoyment. Aspects of my life are no longer innocuous, but instead become exploitable potential for entertainment. It’s really not funny that I scour my life for any scraps of internet-presentable-beauty-or-humor-or-creativity, but it also kind of is because I’m laughing, and it’s getting views, and my friends told me they saw it and liked it. Death to earnestness, long live the internet.