He Yujia (Jasmine)

"The Little Red Book"

Section MS3, Ariel Caine

Keywords: social media, consumerism, identity

Introduction: In the book American psycho, multiple pages are dedicated to describing the main character Patrick Beteman simply by listing all the objects that he owns. He has no inner identity no positive content or personality, rather he is one sign among others, differentiating himself from those below him simply with the objects that he owns. The slogan of a popular mobile phone app in China called Little Red Book says; "mark my life, young people's lifestyle platform". Then what is the life concept and way of young people that this app wants to convey and create? Observing the posts on this app, the contents are all about the fake culture of consumerism. How to pretend to be a socialite by dressing up, how to teach you how to meet those people who were born in purple, imitating the clothes of stars, etc. The platform took advantage of some women's eagerness to transcend class and published some content about gender inequality and lies that lured women to consume.

I use my media studies project to create an abstracted response to The Little Red Book. I thought of those bloggers virtual window as a window in a building, one beside the other, in each window an avatar performing an exaggerated repertory. Their purpose, to attract the attention of an audience.

Production methods: I used metal plates, PVC plates, barbed wire, rice paper, coloured LED beads, wood strips to make an architectural model of a vending machine that metaphorically simulates the environment of The Little Red Book. Then I used my camera to take hundreds of photos around the model from different angles to make stop- motion animation. I collected some bloggers' consumption guiding statements from Little Red Book platform and used them as the background sound for some parts of the stop-motion animation. Finally, I used a scanner to scan my dressing table. My dressing table was full of beautiful things in my eyes, but there was nothing I often used. And consumption did not really make me happier, so this is my reflection. Do I really need a lot of useless spending to boost my satisfaction?