On 19/01/10 20:52, helen varley jamieson wrote: > is "collaboration" really happening on facebook & twitter? > I'm sure it is. But the point of those services is not that they are profound social enablers but that they allow people to stay in touch and maintain relationships over time and over distance. "Social grooming", it's called, and for all the occasional weirdnesses in her writing I think Danah Boyd (http://www.danah.org/) captures the dynamics of social networking and microblogging sites for the people who use them authentically (sic) very well. Given my background in international email-based internet communication I misunderstood how people use group blogs and social networks, and this made me misjudge projects like "Nasty Nets" socially (but not aesthetically).
That said, my point was that the "other party" in sites like Facebook and Twitter that we work with in order to create something is Facebook or Twitter itself. It's an inhuman, alienating collaboration. Sharecropping, to use Lawrence Lessig's term for corporate exploitation of cultural producers. We collaborate not with other people but with software (created by other people whose interests are not our own) to commodify or reify a presentation of our (aspitational, normative, public) selves and relations in the less cyber, less spatial cyberspace of the Internet now that it's something you have to work to avoid rather than something you have to beg steal or borrow access to. Paul Virilio pointed out that the original meaning of "mediation" was negative, implying a punishment of enforced separation from direct access to the royal court. We are accepting mediation by software services as the price of convenient (re-)production of our presentation and consumption of self and social relations on the net. We would not otherwise be able to maintain them without learning HTML, FTP, etc. and staying up late separated from physical human contact in order to maintain this telepresence. Is giving that isolating technological donkey-work up such a terrible price to pay, or is it just an unavoidable consequence of the far greater benefits of not having to service our own cars before we drive to the party? Octavia E. Butler's "Xenogenesis" books spring to mind. I have Facebook and Twitter accounts. I'm pointing the finger at myself here. I mentioned email-based internet communication earlier. Through email and mailing lists I discovered lots of people who have inspire me and have helped me materially. I wouldn't have found out about Joy Garnett, Chris Ashley, MANIK, Pall Thayer, the Furtherfield crew, Annie Abrahams and many other people without email (and in particular, prior to netbehaviour, rhizome-raw...). I wouldn't have had a show in Belgrade, my reviews published, been to many events and shows, had my beliefs and understandings and opinions challenged or changed without email. Or without the other people who worked out how to use it in the pre-Googlemail era. With Facebook and Twitter? I've eventually found the same people. They've posted useful URLs or amusing photographs occasionally. It's good to keep that contact. But it's only keeping that contact. This may be a generational thing. I'm ancient in net years. But email wasn't designed to capture or create social value for monetization by corporations, it was designed to distribute memos on military and academic campuses. Using email for social and artistic (and political) purposes ironised it merely by using it. The same irony isn't possible with the Foxy Whiskered Gentleman's shed of Web 2.0 (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/14814). The obvious way of ironising a social networking service is to make it un- or anti-social. But that precludes collaboration, within the system at least. We collaborate on shared projects. The shared project of Facebook is Facebook. How can we ironise this? [As an aside - How can we introduce and (ew) problematise figure-ground relationships in the aesthetics of Facebook? At least Twitter and MySpace allow you to give your web pages their own background and CSS. Isn't it interesting that Facebook doesn't...] - Rob. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list NetBehaviour@netbehaviour.org http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
