What I learned at MAF

This year at Manchester Animation Festival, I watched a few short animations that dealt with the theme of digital technology. What was frustrating - but not at all surprising - was how they chose to view the topic. One animation I will look at for this post is iRony, which I have linked the trailer to below.

iRony took the form of a spoken poem, accompanied by animation to bring to life the words. However, this animation mostly focused on digital technology - namely, social media - being a drug. It likened social media to pills and an addiction, only focusing on how "likes" and using social media makes humans dumb and like "sheep". While I think the actual animation itself was fairly good, the overall message and meaning was unoriginal and very holier-than-thou. It frustrates me that animations, and other texts much like this, are so popular. They show only the extremes of social media and digital technology, berating those who choose to use them, rather than also pointing to the positive uses of such technology.

What struck me as truly ironic was how the previous animation shown in the screening was about a divorced father, whose only way of seeing his son was through social media and video calling. This is clearly not what the creators of iRony were targeting their animation towards, and it is interesting how texts such as iRony choose to ignore the positives of these growing technologies.

I do think there are problems in the way we use social media in the 21st century, but I don't think they are the problems that iRony shine a light on. Additionally, by showing only the extremes of social media (girls that starve themselves for likes), the message is completely blown out of proportion. The problems in real social media aren't always as extreme as the ones shown in this animation, which leads those who experience real problems to dismiss their own experiences, as they don't believe them to be as bad as the extremes portrayed onscreen.

In the end, narratives such as in iRony are overdone, and seem preachy. They are not relevant, and while there is still validity in the points they are making, the over-exaggeration and offensive metaphor leads texts such as iRony to feel like parody.