Artwork Comments on the Meat Market that is the Tinder App: A Visual Pun to Inspire Your Own Humorous Art

This short video below of an art installation is hilarious if you know what the Tinder App is, and most young folks (say, ages 10-30) that use mobile media do know about it. For those familiar with Tinder, the message about the app is pretty clear, and for media literacy educators it offers an opportunity beyond discussing dating apps to challenge and inspire learners to create their own artwork that expresses their feelings or views on a particular type of media device, app, or use.

If you don't know what Tinder is, the tweens, adolescents, young adults and skeevy over 35's in your life can tell you--though I wouldn't recommend introducing the topic with kids under high school age unless it's already a thing with them. It's a dating app for touch screen mobile phones where you swipe right if you approve of the photo and short bio of the person who appears, or left to see the next person. You may then choose to contact those you swipe right to meet in person or to chat by text or by phone.

I suppose analyzing the metaphor is the right way to start; however, remind learners that you're not doing it to kill the humor, but so that they might be inspired to create their own visual metaphors for some media use that they feel strongly about that we may use uncritically or take for granted. So, um... it's a piece of raw meat repeatedly swiping right on a touch screen phone loaded with the Tinder app--what could it possibly mean?!? You could let that discussion drift into safety and ethical questions around dating apps like Tinder (if you swipe right for that sort of thing), or you could focus on creating visual metaphors for other media uses by breaking learners into creative teams to: 1) choose an app, game, media use, or some such media related behavior they feel strongly about; 2) describe the media app/use/behavior and express their feelings in a sentence or two; 3) develop a visual metaphor to communicate their view of the media app/use/behavior; 4) realize the visual metaphor in their own artwork; 5) if everyone is into it, have a small show of your work for your greater learning community, or post to someplace online (and send us a link!).

The installation above was a video project created in the Netherlends by video game design student Marcello Gomez Maureira. Thanks to boingboing for sharing!

For more on Tinder try this or this... and lots more out there, too.

Clearing Social Media Debts: Do You Need a "Human Bandwidth Manager"?

Overloaded with email? Tired of tweets? Pissed at pinterest? Instaslammed? If you ever feel guilt from neglecting social media participation or fatigue from trying to fit in connecting to all your online "friends," you're in good company. On last week's Portlandia episode (Season 4, Episode 3), Carrie Brownstein declares "Social Bankruptcy" taking the "nuclear option" to erase herself from the Internet and social media against the advice of her "human bandwidth manager." Kick off a discussion about love/hate relationships with social media using this clip.
The premise of posing a financial counselor for social media participation may be particularly poignant for college students, powerfully casting our time spent online as an investment. Possible discussion questions to pose before viewing: What are the techniques used to deliver the humor? What's the premise for each joke? What messages does the sketch deliver about the costs and benefits of retreating from social media use? What values and lifestyles are represented? What would happen to you or your friends if you took similar action to Carrie? How do you balance and value your social media participation and offline activities? Discussion could connect to classic media literacy activities like keeping a media diary/log for a week to assess your own time management and types of engagements, or experimenting with a media retreat to gain perspective on our investments in online culture and relationships.

An avalanche of messages buries Carrie. How would you visually portray your relationship to social media? 

The opening sequence of the Portlandia sketch visually communicates the prominence of social media messages in Carrie's character's life. How would you visualize the role of social media in your life? Production activity extensions might include making short documentaries on your social media commitments, or those of friends and family; or making your own comedy sketches to exaggerate the cost/benefits and parody media management strategies. You might even try creating interview scripts for the "human bandwidth manager" and improv roleplaying to discuss media management strategies.

Using humor to introduce discussions of love/hate relationships with communication technology may help to keep participants open to learning about each others strategies and styles of media management, rather than slipping into a mess of judgmental jockeying and defensiveness--especially with this sketch that gets at familiar feelings, both positive and negative. By showing the costs of extreme immersion and extreme withdrawal, the sketch opens up space discuss strategies of balance for digital media participation.