Date of Award

2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Anderson, Kim

Keywords

Social Media, Culture, Fethishization

Area of Concentration

Art

Abstract

This thesis, Forever Young, is an investigation into the methods and motivations of users creating online self-representations on social media platforms. The studio work that accompanies this paper is a visual exploration of how this trend’s flagship generation, the millennials, encode these avatars with identity through the use of images. It is accompanied by a survey of the strategies and uses of portraiture over the past century, in an effort to contextualize the modern day usage. The paper establishes the role of commercial imagery in the evolution of representation, and the ways in which the advertising industry appropriated the modes of encoding meaning. This assimilation was soon followed by the emergence of social media platforms, which offered even further diffusion of the control over images. In this paper I use relevant theories about the spectacle and visual culture to explore nature of this interplay, and the aspects that entice users to perpetuate it. Through the accompanying paintings and drawings I investigate the conflicts that manifest within the choices of online user content selection. Ultimately, I determine that these motivations are closely tied to the fetishization of youth, an effect of commercial imagery; a trend that has intensified due to the feedback loop inherent to this democratic system of images.

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