Justin Dusett wants you to think about your relationship with social media a little differently.
"What I keep coming back to is the idea of addiction. It's something I've always been fearful of. I like to be in power, and when you're addicted to something, that power is taken away from you, and when I was growing up I was surrounded by addiction."
Dusett is a designer in Rochester, and his project called Modern Addiction features depictions of all your favorite social media re-imagined as addictive substances. Instagram becomes a bottle of pills, Snap Chat is a grande latte, and Facebook's name is scrawled across a pack of cigarettes.
"I noticed as I got older that we're all addicted to something; it's been a constant and evident truth in our culture since its inception. So I was looking at my generation and noticed that we always have our phones in our hands."
The project is interactive. Posters invite you to scan a QR code on your phone for more information about the outlets they represent. The project also promotes itself via social media, inviting its audience to like and follow its creator on various platforms. Simultaneously benefiting from and being critical of a society dependent on digital connections may seem contradictory, but not to Dusett.
"The ability to communicate with somebody so quickly is a good thing, and receiving gratification from that interaction so quickly is a good thing, but it becomes a bad thing when it overtakes physical interaction."
Dusett says awareness can be enough of a catalyst for people to change the way they interact with "social technology." He hopes to bring people that awareness through this project, which is accessible - appropriately enough - via the Modern Addiction website.
Dusett is talking with Monroe Community College students about the project on May 5, 2015 at 3:30pm at the Forum in the R. Thomas Flynn Campus Center.
