Feed Your Mind, Mind Your Feed Campaign
‘Feed Your Mind, Mind Your Feed’, created by The Rowdy Squirrels Collective (Me, Finn Rankin, Abi Reynolds and Meghan Nelson),
is a campaign designed to inform young social media users of the harmful impacts that an automated content algorithm system has on them.
It recognises a growing social issue where people are dependent on algorithmically generated feeds of information and no longer demand control of what is shared with them. People are losing context and adopting patterns of ‘lost helplessness’, where they look to solve personal issues through the opinions of others online - often toxic. This lack of control
is dangerous and the campaign shares why as well as how to take back control of their feeds.
Me, Finn, Abi and Meghan sought to create a campaign which encouraged social interaction - appealing to the needs of the audience and spreading the message efficiently. We created several forms of marketing including a guerilla marketing experience called ‘look up’, demonstrated on a trailer (right). ‘Look up’ works around the environment of dissociating from the experience of watching harmful content on a phone and becoming aware of the impact of it. We created a printable booklet template available on our website to encourage people to re-locate our scene of posters and spray-painted text to spread the message.
To further reinforce the message, we created t-shirts in which stencil for the text also available online.
Visualising the algorithm
My role in design for this campaign was moving image content and I aimed to visualise the harmful algorithm so that a viewer could associate it with a physical identity rather than an abstract concept. Visualising the algorithm as a sort-of lifeform that exists psychologically poses more of a threat to a viewer over text and information.
I used ASCII object tracking on After Effects to visualise particular shapes and type depending on the light settings of the objects I was using. I visualised both moving patterns (to replicate the appearance of algorithm trends) and objects (to provide the engagement of a recognisable
existing being).
I used some of the objects I generated as footage for my social media marketing on Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram to attract target demographics into the campaign.