“
I realized then that tweeting is the greatest endeavor a procrastinator could want. See, in those days, there was personality in it. There was respect, comradeship, reciprocity. Hashtags that had never been tagged before. Today, it’s all cutthroat, clichéd and dry, and there’s no chance for bringing friendship to bear—no personality. You see what I mean?
I realized then that tweeting is the greatest endeavor a procrastinator could want. See, in those days, there was personality in it. There was respect, comradeship, reciprocity. Hashtags that had never been tagged before. Today, it’s all cutthroat, clichéd and dry, and there’s no chance for bringing friendship to bear—no personality. You see what I mean?
They don’t retweet me anymore!
”from ”WILLY LOMAN CONTEMPLATES TWITTERCIDE”.
Via McSweeney’s
[Note: This link will open up a PDF of the Journal Article]
”’Our findings further extend previous evidence of systematic cultural differences in the offline world to cyberspace, supporting the extended real-life hypothesis,” the researchers said, “which suggests that individuals express and communicate their self-representation at online social network sites as a product of extended social cognitions and behaviours.’”
“This essay examines social media content leading up to the presidential elections in May 2012. It provides ten interactive graphs to illustrate public opinion expressed on Twitter. These graphs represent sentiment and semantic analyses of over two million tweets from seventeen hashtag feeds posted 10 April 2012 through 24 May 2012. The following hashtags are in the study: #egyelections, #egypresiden, #egypt as well as the Arabic hashtags شفيق# حمدين# ,انتخابات_الرئاسة# ,العباسيه# ,ابوالفتوح# ,خالد_على# , موسى# ,مرسي# ,#مصر….The data visualizations generated seek to illustrate and improve our understanding of the sensibilities and cultural logic(s)3 that are being expressed by the people on Twitter. It is not to say philosophical underpinnings to the nature of a virtual world are new and revelatory; nor does this argument purport that the what is being expressed online in the digital world is necessarily representative of what happens on the ground. In places like Egypt where literacy rates only reach 66%4, analyses of Internet penetration hold less weight5.”
Via http://www.jadaliyya.com - This is a great resource for essays about all things Middle Eastern politics and culture.
The Project for the Study of Corporate Personhood
I am so excited for Kenyatta Cheese’s The Project for the Study of Corporate Personhood. He’s doing a performance art piece that questions the legal standing that corporations can be treated as persons. And he’s taking it pretty far to reveal the absurdities of modern corporate jurisprudence.
Kenyatta is going to set up a corporation. He is going to sell his identity to a corporation for 3 months and the corporation will take over Kenyatta’s identity online and offline. The corporation will subsume all responsibilities for overseeing the Kenyatta Cheese brand during the 3 months. This means all uses of the name “Kenyatta Cheese” will be under the corporation’s control.
When the corporation buys the name “kenyatta cheese,” the corporation will treat it as if it bought any other product or company. So press releases, marketing, and publicity will all be part of the process.
So what are some the things that this corporation will do with the identity of Kenyatta Cheese?
- create a manual on how to be kenyatta cheese
- hire people off of Criagslist to be Kenyatta Cheese at public events (they will use the manual for guidance)
- ask friends of Kenyatta Cheese like Baratunde, Kevin Slavin, and others to be Kenyatta Cheese at social gatherings (conferences, parties, dinner events)
- hold online events where people can interact with the hired kenyatta cheeses
It really makes us think about what it means to turn a person into a product. I imagine that anyone who works at a marketing company would have a lot to learn from this. And just as a design research project, it’s super fascinating to ask how we design for users when the user is a corporation. How can Kenyatta Cheese turn himself into a replicable product?
I love art projects with critical teeth! I also love his pictograms of his project, though I believe his hair should be twice the size.
I personally am excited to see pictures of Kenaytta’s friend in an afro wig - I guess this is what it takes to get Kevin Slavin, Elspeth Roundtree, Jamie Wilkinson, and Nora Abousteit into an afro wig!
The Project for the Study of Corporate Personhood
This is my project proposal for a 2012-13 Rhizome artist commission. I’m going to sell my name to a corporation for three months. They will take over all of my public interactions both online and irl. Kenyatta will become a product. I will not exist.
The Project for Corporate Personhood (aka Kenyatta Co) is a three month performance that explores the topics of “corporate personhood” and personal identity.
The American Supreme Court and some politicians have declared that corporations should be treated as persons. So what happens when a person voluntary assigns their personhood to a corporation? Can it be used to raise awareness of the issue of corporate personhood and create spectacle in the process?
Kenyatta Cheese (creator of Know Your Meme, an artist, an activist, and a person) will sell the exclusive use of his name to a corporation for a period of three months. That corporation will assume both the real world and online identity of ‘Kenyatta Cheese’, reimagining his personhood as a brand with the help of ethnographers, lawyers, focus groups, public relations departments, a creative agency, and friends and acquaintances. During this period, Kenyatta (the person) will not be able to use his name except in the case of emergencies and air travel.
In order to develop Kenyatta Cheese (the product), the corporation will conduct research and development, mining his personal life, online profiles, and browser data for uniquely identifying information. The corporation will hire his friends and family to “be” Kenyatta Cheese at public events, speaking engagements (technology and media conferences), and social gatherings, interacting with people based on their own ideas of how they think Kenyatta Cheese would behave.
These public interactions will be documented through hidden video and interviews will be conducted to capture the thoughts and feelings of the Kenyatta Cheese “betas”. People who interact with these betas will be given a business card directing them to complete a customer service survey online.
This documentation will serve as the basis of standard operating procedures for being Kenyatta Cheese, brand guidelines, and a marketing and media buying plan. The corporation will then hire social media “gurus” to take over and run all instances of Kenyatta Cheese online including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and a personal website. Strangers will be hired off of Craigslist to represent the brand at public events in cities around the world (complete with afro wig and business cards). Like the research beforehand, the interactions of these Craigslist hires will be documented and they will be interviewed.
The three month project will culminate in the compilation of a dozen or so interview videos, the creation of the corporate and product documents, the capture of company interactions in social media, and hopefully two public panels: one at SXSW (or similar conference) exploring the topic of personal identity and marketing featuring 4-5 “Kenyattas” and a second panel at the New Museum exploring the topic of identity through the stories of several Kenyatta’s, artists working on similar issues, and representatives from each of the companies involved in creating Kenyatta Co.
Possible Kenyattas will include but not be limited to author Baratunde Thurston, technologist Anil Dash, artist Kevin Slavin, writers Nick Bilton and Clive Thompson, entrepreneurs Nora Abousteit, Know Your Meme co-creators Jamie Wilkinson and Elspeth Rountree, performers Mike Rugnetta and Patrick Davison, actress Michelle Krusiec, sociologist Tricia Wang, and Kenyatta’s mom.
I’ll be interested in seeing how this turns out. I’ll save some thoughts for a more in-depth post, but one thing that does immediately come to mind is the relationship of brands to social “influencers” (i.e., people within peer networks that are identified as influential in given category among their peers). In particular, I’m thinking about instances where influencers are asked to write or create content on behalf of a brand. Disclaimers aside (e.g., FTC regulations around sponsored social media posts), is there a kind of pseudo-corporate/corporatized personhood that is created in that exchange? In marketing, we talk a lot of authenticity and authentic relationships between consumers and brands. So when people in the industry reach out to influencers to connect them with a demo or a new product, there’s the hope that they’ll be so smitten with the new product that they’ll want to tell everyone they know about it. Sometimes that happens. But there’s also the reality of people who game the system and basically act as brand schillers on their blogs, so much so that their online personas are basically an extended mouthpiece for whatever brand reaches out to them. Where do they fit in a model of corporate (or branded) personhood? What larger questions about unpaid (digital) labor are raised by this exchange? More later.
A Tumblr friend of mine, Tricia Wang, gave a talk about trust in online social networks at the Lift 12 conference in Geneva. Tricia is really great at stripping out industry and academic jargon and getting straight to the point. There are great points in this talk; give it your attention.
“Nostalgia for the good old days of disconnection would not just be pointless, it would be hypocritical and ungrateful. But the very magic of the new machines, the efficiency and elegance with which they serve us, obscures what isn’t being served: everything that matters. What Facebook has revealed about human nature—and this is not a minor revelation—is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect.”
If Facebook had been invented in 1995. Note: you’ll need Netscape to properly load this video.
“
Futurist John Smart, president and founder of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, recalled an insight of economist Simon Kuznets about evolution of technology effects known as the Kuznets curve: “First-generation tech usually causes ‘net negative’ social effects; second-generation ‘net neutral’ effects; by the third generation of tech—once the tech is smart enough, and we’ve got the interface right, and it begins to reinforce the best behaviors—we finally get to ‘net positive’ effects,” he noted. “We’ll be early into conversational interface and agent technologies by 2020, so kids will begin to be seriously intelligently augmented by the internet. There will be many persistent drawbacks however [so the effect at this point will be net neutral]. The biggest problem from a personal-development perspective will be motivating people to work to be more self-actualized, productive, and civic than their parents were. They’ll be more willing than ever to relax and remain distracted by entertainments amid accelerating technical productivity.
“As machine intelligence advances,” Smart explained, “the first response of humans is to offload their intelligence and motivation to the machines. That’s a dehumanizing, first-generation response. Only the later, third-generation educational systems will correct for this.”
”From Pew’s Study “Millennials will benefit and suffer due to their hyperconnected lives”
In a survey about the future of the internet, technology experts and stakeholders were fairly evenly split as to whether the younger generation’s always-on connection to people and information will turn out to be a net positive or a net negative by 2020. They said many of the young people growing up hyperconnected to each other and the mobile Web and counting on the internet as their external brain will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who will do well in key respects.
The long-form responses to the questions are worth reading and considering. Or if you are particularly nerdy, get your smartest friends together to drink and talk about the survey questions, responses and implications. Tell them to turn off their smartphones.
Best definition of the word ‘content’ I’ve seen yet. Industry colleagues, take note.
“
If one concedes the point that a Sabbath for restorative reasons need not proscribe technology, it may seem pointless to argue against the digital sabbath. What’s the harm?
The reason is that if we allow ourselves to blame the technology for distracting us from our children or connecting with our communities, then the solution is simply to put away the technology. We absolve ourselves of the need to create social, political, and, sure, technological structures that allow us to have the kinds of relationships we want with the people around us. We need to realize that at the core of our desire for a Sabbath isn’t a need to escape the blinking screens of our electronic world, but the ways that work and other obligations have intruded upon our lives and our relationships.
We can begin by mimicking the Sabbath in small, by recognizing that by dedicating time to one activity or one person, without interruption from gadgets, work, or other people, will help us slow down and connect. We can use our gadgets to do this — a long talk on the phone is the most obvious way — or we can leave them out of it
”From “We Don’t Need a Digital Sabbath, We Need More Time,”
Via The Atlantic
“
It’s not hard to imagine how the less confident students, despite moving in a forum that promised connections galore, might grow more isolated, revving the cycle all over again.
I find these results oddly heartbreaking. It seems an irony typical of the Internet that the people who feel safest expressing themselves online actually damage their social standing when they do so. Not because they’re somehow opting out of the real world, as Facebook critics like to insist, but because they are lulled into relaxing their facades. Cheery icons and a shiny, sanitized format make it easy to project the friendliness of a diary onto the Facebook community. Yet the site doesn’t “change” your audience so much as disguise it. Those with low self-esteem may treasure Facebook because it eliminates situations in which social feedback is inevitable (whereas you can’t help seeing your friend’s aggrieved expression when you slip up in person). But you need live feedback to teach you to navigate relationships with grace.
We’ve heard how Internet anonymity—or the illusion of it—can give people license to act like boors. Yet it seems we’re less attuned to the dangers of seeing other Internet users as anonymous or unreal. Social networking sites, with their endlessly personalized apps, can sometimes feel less like meeting places than giant mirrors (Facebook for me has always had the echoey effect of a mansion that a crowd of partiers has just vacated.) Amanda Forest’s study should remind us that when we’re online, for better or for worse, we’re not alone.
”From Slate’s “If You Think Your Facebook “Friends” Don’t Like You, They Probably Don’t”
“But you need live feedback to teach you to navigate relationships with grace.” I don’t think I could like this sentence more if I tried. Real time social dynamics, especially negative ones, can be incredibly powerful catalysts for individual growth. But more importantly, having opinions, even ones that are perceived as unsavory, are what make you interesting and worthwhile as a person. That being said, someone who is constantly negative in their FB updates may be perceived as trying to gain attention or deliberately trying to be provocative which, in turn, can incite more people to dislike them. There is a fine line between being opinionated and being a whiny jerk.
“In our phone survey, we asked SNS users a variety of questions about their close friends on and offline, the kind of support they received from their friends, the level of diversity of their social circles, and their civic and political activity. We matched the answers to those survey questions to data in these users’ Facebook logs and then analyzed the relationship between certain activities on Facebook and the social lives of these users. One key finding is that Facebook users who received more friend requests and those that accepted more of those friend requests tended to report that they received more social support/assistance from friends (on and offline). There was also a weak, but positive relationship between receiving and approving friendship requests, as well as posting status updates, and higher levels of emotional support, such as help with a personal problem.”
From “Why most Facebook users get more than they give”
Via Pew Internet
My immediate thought on the above, albeit interesting, correlation is that more gregarious and social people (i.e., the kinds of people who are more likely to receive and accept friend requests) are probably more likely, due to their social nature, to ask for/receive more emotional support from friends. Other than acting as another communication tool between people, does Facebook actually affect the process or encourage people to reach out more? My inclination would be to say that in certain situations that is the case but it’s contingent on the willingness of people to publicly share their feelings or needs. But what of people in need but who are unable to communicate those needs? Does FB empower them to give or receive more support?
“Documentary vision is kind of like the “camera eye” photographers develop when, after taking many photos, they begin to see the world as always a potential photo even when not holding the camera at all. The habit of the photographer involuntarily framing and composing the world has become a metaphor for those trained to document using social media. The explosion of ubiquitous self-documentation possibilities, and the audience for our documents that social media promises, has positioned us to live life in the present with the constant awareness of how it will be perceived as having already happened. We come to see what we do as always a potential document, imploding the present with the past, and ultimately making us nostalgic for the here and now.”
