Watching: where the grass is really greener

Overview

As the most prominent social media apps evolve around visual content, Instagram and Tiktok shape and shift the contemporary aesthetic experience profoundly and worldwide. Algorithmically curated content, aiming to maintain heightened states of emotions, creates a constant affect triggering. These platforms work as asynchronous content aggregator platforms, where the private sphere and the public get annexed so that context collapses and traditionally easily distinguishable contents get relativized. Users undergo a myriad of ephemeral affects leading to a permanent feeling of being overwhelmed and distracted.