The theme of my intervention is the information cocoon, specifically the information cocoon formed by the U.S. election on various social media platforms. My target group is non-US citizens. This month, my social media is full of information about the presidential election. Although I am not a U.S. citizen and have no obvious preference for either party, I have more or less learned about the information of each party because of the information bombardment. Even on purely Chinese social media, I can still get information related. I am wondering if this is just my case or if other non-US citizens are also like this.
I set up a Google form and set the following conditions in the form:
Please open up your social media- any social media is fine. Please screenshot the first message related to Democratic or Republican information. The collected images will be used in an art piece.
To be specific:
1. If you see a celebrity that clearly in favor of a party, take a screenshot
2. If it’s a video, take a screenshot
3. If you are uncertain about the message, please scroll to another one
4. If your platform is not in English, it’s okay, take a screenshot.
Here is a result from Google Forms. Also, two screenshots are coming from private messages and all of them are republicans. Since the Google form was posted after the election results, almost all the post was biased towards Republicans.
The screenshots mainly come from English social media, but it is surprising to see news from Japanese and Chinese media because they have a tendency, including the Japanese news that although did not directly mention the biased party, indirectly strengthened the glory of the victory in this election.
I chose to make a collage of these screenshots, not an artistic collage, but with some meme elements. I tried to mock the election results and the bias that the election has caused in various media, even though non-U.S. citizens cannot vote, it still has an impact to some extent. I posted this collage on my social media, trying to make my non-US citizen friends realize how much they have been affected by the information cocoon of the US election on social media.
