Batam: Remote Viewing of the Reality Disparities on Social Media

A cross-disciplinary semester project by Freda Bing Yie Ju

With the increasing use and consumption of social media, misrepresentations and biases can become so innate that most people fail to see how social media can skew their perspectives. This project aims to show the inherent problems with social media through visual depictions.

The project is based in the context of an island city - Batam, Indonesia. Being a place of recent rapid developments, persisting disparities and enduring enclaves, Batam presents an interesting intersection of glamour and hardship. With its high concentration of young residents, social media is the inevitable tool used by locals to document and share life stories, albeit on a selective and biased basis.

The project output is derived entirely from observation at a distance through social media. With research focused on the island of Batam and the use of Instagram as the main social media platform, this project traces and documents posts that are geographically tagged to different locations on the island. The final output presents, contrasts, and juxtaposes social media “realities” versus factual realities. Hence putting forth the question: “Is social media reality more real than actual reality?”