It’s been awhile, but I’m in the SF Bay Area and I decided to make a audio/photo update on what I’ve been doing.
Enjoy!
Hello From California!
June 26th, 2009
Jared Black is…
February 24th, 2009
While working on my recent Internet art project, I had the idea of pointing a camera outside, recording a frame, finding the average color, and then using that value as part of the project. What I wasn’t anticipating was that the average color of the sky or a street is nearly always a color approaching gray. This wasn’t the result I was expecting, but I should have realized the result sooner; it would have saved myself some time checking my program code for errors. A net artist I was looking at over the past week seems to have been successful in taking a cross section of an Internet audience and returning a vibrant value.
Lee Walton takes status messages from his Facebook friends and acts them out on camera for his ongoing f’book project. Status messages are short one line sentences answering the question “What are you doing right now?”. When the feature was first rolled-out on Facebook, users could type in their answer or pick an answer from a drop-down selection box with preset responses such as “at home” or “at work”. The drop-down selection box was quickly removed after it was apparent that most users preferred to write their own witty remarks. The videos Lee Walton creates are often humorous since the status messages are acted out literally. For example, the video for “Jessi Stern is forgetting.” shows a pot of water boiling in the foreground as Walton relaxes on a chair while cracking open a novel. The video for “Scott Snibbe Eating honey, the natural antibiotic.” shows Walton eating honey directly from the jar.
Although it is certain that Walton’s 699 friends on Facebook are very diverse, all the videos have a Walton behaving in a similar way. I would imagine that at the end of this project someone could edit together all the status videos and end up with a decent short film with a linear storyline about just one odd man. The cross section of Facebook users isn’t gray at all, but it is monochromatic. This may have to do with how witty status messages seem popular on Facebook. Everyone seems to be a little eccentric in their status messages.
I think it would be interesting to see how these videos would turn out if made on other social networks with features similar to Facebook’s status message. LinkedIn has a textbox that asks, “What are you working on?”. With the business atmosphere that is promoted on LinkedIn, the videos would undoubtedly take on a different tone. It seems that the reason that we don’t get a gray from the cross-section of Facebook or LinkedIn users is because these networks don’t represent Internet users as a whole. The networks instead serve as online environments that affect people’s behavior as they travel through it. People in online environments change their behavior accordingly just as their behavior would change as they move from home to work or another environment. The problem with this model of social networks being environments is that there is no geographical distance separating any of these environments. Your boss at LinkedIn can just take a peek out of his hypothetical window and see that you go to Adult FriendFinder and Fubar after work. It doesn’t matter that you just stand in the lobby and don’t do anything, your boss saw you go in the building. Forget about privacy settings, just having an account with a social network says things about you, it’s the reason why online dating sites still have a stigma associated with them.
Aram Bartholl asks questions about the impact of belonging to social networks with his work, Are You Social? Bartholl’s work is a t-shirt with a list of about 80 social networks and their logos. People get a shirt are expected to write a check mark next to the social networks they are a part of. Wearing something like this in a public space speaks a lot of the person wearing it. At a glance someone can tell what kind of things that person is interested in. Some of these conclusions may be incorrect just like many stereotypes in real life, but that won’t stop people from jumping to them.
It has been suggested by many bloggers that networking sites like Facebook sit on a goldmine of user data for advertisers if they would sell it to those companies. The truth is that advertisers don’t need to buy that data, they can already acquire a ton of information by just seeing who joins what network. The Internet may look gray if taken as a whole, but each social networking site has its own unique color.
Internet Centralization & Copyright Issues
February 17th, 2009
I have previously talked of the freedom that the Internet can give users through its decentralized nature. I hope that this decentralized way of thinking can transcend the boundaries of the Internet and change society. One thing that I have not touched on before is the frustrations users feel due to the decentralized nature of the Internet. One of the disadvantages of the Internet is that there is no centralized hub for users to share ideas. The Internet may be likened to the wild west. There are few rules and it’s easy to get lost in the vast desert. In theory, anyone can set up a webpage on the Internet, but there is a barrier of learning a scripting language and securing space on a web server. Then there’s the problem of letting your contacts know where the page is. It’s hard to know that Keith Smith’s email is d2paladin56@yahoo.com if he hasn’t directly told you. There is no extensive phone book for the web. To help alleviate web users’ pain, many services have popped-up that offer a more centralized way of sharing information. Services like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and Wordpress are often described as being part of Web 2.0. They all offer user the ability to easily create content and share it with others. The fact that I am writing this in a web browser on Google Docs shows how Web 2.0 applications make things easier. When I am done writing, I can easily publish this document to a blog, a webpage, or send this document in an email using just three clicks of the mouse. If my computer crashes, it’s ok. My document is saved for me on reliable servers.
The disadvantage of many Web 2.0 applications, at least at this time, is that it is unclear who owns the copyright to content. The terms of service Web 2.0 sites use are often vague. Facebook recently came under fire from many bloggers and Internet users for changing their terms of service by deleting a clause that previously explicitly stated that Facebook did not have any license to deleted user-generated content. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg created a post on The Facebook Blog Monday evening titled On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information to try to alleviate the worries of Facebook users. He explains that when a message is sent on Facebook two copies are made, one for the sender and one for the receiver. If the sender deletes their message the receiver should still be able to have a copy. Facebook is just clarifying their terms of service to protect themselves. Zuckerberg goes on to say,
In reality, we wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want. The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work. Our goal is to build great products and to communicate clearly to help people share more information in this trusted environment.
Zuckerberg’s statement makes sense, but the terms of service doesn’t make sense to the average Internet user unless they are explained, something that most Web 2.0 sites won’t do. Not everyone who uses the Internet should be expected to be a lawyer and actually understand the huge terms of service for every website they sign-up for. Instead, people put their content up on sites like Facebook with the trust that they will do nothing evil with it. In real life, people have to read through a lengthy contract infrequently. On the Internet, users are expected to do this constantly and it can be aggravating.
I believe that Web 2.0 services could learn from the non-profit organization Creative Commons. Creative Commons allows people to redistribute their work under a license that makes it clear what rights they still own. People can read the license in three ways, a Human-Readable Commons Deed, a Layer-Readable Legal Code, and a Machine-Readable Digital Code. This system allows end users to understand what the copyright license of a work is in a glance while still having a more complex legal code underneath to protect the providers. Creative Commons licenses are not useful for commercial entities like Facebook because the licenses focus on the distribution of creative work and emphasize non-commercial use, but a similar model could apply to Web 2.0 services.
Although there will always be copyright issues on the Internet, a better system is needed to help nurture the growth of the Internet as a creative platform. Although I have a Facebook and YouTube account, I never post any of my ’serious’ work on these sites due to their cloudy terms of service. I am lucky to have space on a web server to put my own works on the Internet, but not everyone has this luxury. Even in my case, it’s much easier to get people on the Internet to look at a video on YouTube than a video a posted on another web page because of YouTube’s built-in audience. My personal webpage only gets a fraction of the thousands of hits that my YouTube account gets. Centralized hubs on the Internet definitely have their advantages. They just need to work out some issues before they start complement the decentralized nature of the Internet.
UPDATE: 2/18/09
Facebook has just reverted to their old terms of service while they work on the next version due to the controversy the other terms of service caused. I think this speaks a lot about democratization on the Internet. For the most part, everyone on the Internet has an equal voice. It is easier to get things changed in the virtual world when they’re wrong not because it’s easier to change it, but because it’s easier for people to voice their concern about it.
Alternate Identies On The Internet
February 10th, 2009In 1974, artist Lynn Hershman created Roberta Breitmore as a real life alternate identity for herself. Over the course of four years Roberta had left a paper trail including dental records, a credit report, and a driver’s license. Voyeurs of Breitmore’s life could make up their own interpretations based on what documents they saw and what real-life interactions they experienced. Hershman describes Breitmore as a “mirror that reflected social biases at the time.”
The concept of alternate identities may have been more foreign in the 1970’s, but with the rise of the Internet, normal people make use of alternate identities everyday. Creating an alternate identity is a prerequisite to access online communities even if that identity closely approximates reality. Lynn Hershman likens these identities to tribal masks, “masks camouflage the body, and in doing so liberate and give voice to virtual selves.”
Looking into a mirror and really studying myself has always been odd to me. In real life, I’m usually not too concerned about my own appearance. I wear nondescript clothing and don’t look at the mirror for any longer than a brief glance before leaving my apartment in the morning. Normally I shave whenever my girlfriend or someone else makes the observation that it has been awhile since I’ve shaved. When I look into the mirror for longer than a glance, I often see a stranger staring back. Parts of him look familiar, but the surface of his face is not what I identify with. While playing The Sims 2, my girlfriend recently made avatars that are a close approximation of how we look in real life. Her avatar looked remarkably like how she really looks, right down to an almost exact replica of a shirt she commonly wears. When I first saw my avatar that she created for me, my first reaction was that it was off quite a bit. After examining the avatar more carefully and examining myself in a mirror, I concluded that the avatar was in fact a good approximation of how I looked.
Being a product of the digital age, I have created several alternate identities for myself on the Internet. In an odd way, I sometimes find myself being more concerned of my online alternate identities than my real identity. Facebook and YouTube are my mirrors. They are more like funhouse mirrors than real mirrors, distorting and changing my perception of myself. In Understanding Media The Extensions Of Man, Marshal McLuhan writes that “men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves” He refers to the story of Narcissus and Echo with media being the water Narcissus looks into for the modern man. At one point I found that gazing at myself in the online mirrors was taking up more of my time than it should. Little by little, I started to change my presence on the Internet. I slashed personal information from my Internet profiles, not in fear of online predators, but in fear of myself. While my Facebook account remains today, the profile is truncated and altered to a point that it reflects little of myself. As a result I spend much less time on Facebook than I did in the past.
Beyond using the Internet as a funhouse mirror, I also have several online accounts that serve to completely change who I am in a sort of plastic surgery for the mind. I try on different personalities, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds by just changing a few parameters. For me, it is often a way for me to explore my sexuality without a body getting in the way. It could be the fulfillment of a fetish that is impossible to achieve in real life or simply a validation from other avatars. I don’t consider myself to be an over sexual person in real life, but I am usually flattered when someone male or female tries to flirt with me. The same feeling is felt when someone makes a comment about my avatar and tries to flirt with me online. These online experiences makes me feel more comfortable about my real life sexuality.
To what extent do online experiences, even ones that involve alternate identities, affect reality? Lynn Hershman states that “reality may be limited to preconceptions that can be verified through words or visual codes. Perceptions are the drive to action that influences, if not controls real events.” Judging from past experience, what an alternate identity does has an impact on that real life person. Often when a person is trying on an alternate identity, he is fantasizing about something he would like to become. Normally I am much more aggressive in my online personalities than in real life, a trait that I wish I had more of in real life. There are a few instances where I have seen a gradual alteration of a person in real life that mirrors aspects of an online personality generated by that person months or sometimes years before. I am mystified and sometimes afraid by games like The Sims, a life sim that has correctly predicted many of my real life events. I don’t attribute any kind of witchcraft to the uncanny way that The Sims predicts things, instead I realize that I am unconsciously directing the events of the game to reflect my goals and desires.
Alternate identities are no longer just the stuff of fiction or psychological sessions. People use alternate identities every time they use in Internet service no matter if it’s just a email account or a service that encourages more elaborate identities like Second Life. Given the way that one’s perceptions can affect real life events, I don’t consider online experiences with alternate identities to be separate experiences from real life. They are instead extensions of people and their desires.