Share now/please share

Social media icons are ubiquitous on the modern internet, haphazardly-placed and misaligned, almost background noise. But they’re not passive: each one is a beacon, tracking your online movement and associating it to your social media account. Every thumbs-up, every +1, every plaintive call to Share now/please share thereby co-opts our natural sense of social identity, and subverts the relationship between content and viewer.

The exhibit collected just a fraction of the icons that might be encountered in a few days’ internet use, stripping them of their context to highlight their absurdity.

Oslo Kaffebar, Berlin, 2015. Source material at uggggghh.tumblr.com.