Azalea FaghiVaseghi

Digital Embrace is a data driven exercise that explores how the internet is potentially affecting us in ways we are unaware of.

Description

Although social media claims to catalyze social connections, much of the time it only serves to simplify our experiences and lives into manageable, easy to digest snippets. This according to, psychologist and the professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT, Sherry Turkle “turns [people] into something close to objects” and, consequently, makes oneself “vulnerable to seeing itself as one.” This method of interaction, according to Turkle, breeds narcissism, which in psychoanalysis, is “not to indicate people who love themselves, but a personality…who cannot tolerate the complicated demands of other people but tries to relate to them by distorting who they are” and so “gets on with others only by dealing with their made-to-measure representations”. This level of control in online interaction, couple with our body’s release of the “cuddle drug” oxytocin during the act of social media engagement, create an allure that few are able to resist. But how is this potentially affecting the way we interact in the long run? Digital embrace seeks to unveil these shifts are they are occurring.

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