Typical Associations: Privacy, emotional release, teenage troubles, one-person reader-writer universe, confidante.
This idea was inspired from a Sting song ‘ Fortress Around Your Heart’ where in the chorus he mentions that in order to protect his lover he builds a fortified security where he almost keeps her prisoner, only to later find that he has to watch his step to reach her. The idea extended naturally to diaries where we can get irrationally overprotective of what we write and vent out. However, in the day and age of Facebook, did our venting of our emotions through paper stop? Did we stop musing to ourselves and search for an audience instead? This shift in behavior intrigued me in the context of the diary where something extremely private is holding information that unbeknownst to most of us is visible to a lot of watching agents. The visual cues from the diary gave my test audience the impression that it was adolescent, even feminine; the button loop emphasizing the protection. While most of us would still keep our crushes confined in the scrim of pages in a diary, I thought it would be interesting to not repurpose my chosen object but to highlight a behavior that we have already moved on from a while ago.
Another idea that I was toying around with was to stick all the pages of the diary together, as a direct extension of Sting’s song. However, I thought the idea of Facebook was more multi-layered and made a stronger statement.
New associations: vulnerable, violation of privacy, lack of trust