Scrolling

I noticed in a physical sense one of my most common interactions with both my phone and my laptop was the act of scrolling. Due to current website design standards most sites have some element of this and many social media sites have deployed infinite scroll features in an effort to retain user traffic. There is something addictive and mind-numbing about the action. Certain things are given a greater level of time and notice, others are simply swiped past in a continuous motion downwards. Ultimately I treat it as a time-filler, something that wiles away idle moments, but what I have increasingly found is my own addiction to the process.

In order to get a better understanding of one of my most often used applications (Facebook), my laptop recorded my activity over a period of 10 minutes, recording the videos I watched, images I lingered on and online interactions I made. The combination of trivial amusing videos, notifications and updates from friends and the more serious items of world news was of particular interest and the amount of time they attracted my attention.

This became source material for intrusive pop ups in my final video installation, drawing on the way in which the Facebook application submits intrusive notifications to my laptop without permission. This took the feature to an absurd proportion; rather than simply giving a 10 second message with a single notification, the scroll feeds would pop up over the text which was 'intentionally' displayed.