I’m about to embark on my first no-email vacation in 5 years. I will not be blogging, emailing, phoning or otherwise staying connected with anything other than the playa. I love you all and i’ll see you in September!
When i return, i will be back in school officially. So, if you have the urge to email me, realize that i’m not prepared for my email overload and will probably take a month to make up for 2 weeks away.
Whenever i read about or hear about the Friendster/Fakester Revolution, i can’t help but think back to Kate Bornstein’s “Nearly Roadkill”.
For those who haven’t read it, it’s the story of a point in time where the Internet is controlled by corporations who serve the needs of the government. Outraged at having to constantly identify themselves online, a group of netizens gather to revolt. Of course, this is all told through a fun erotic story between two characters who refuse to reveal their gender, instigating an FBI search.
Clay Shirky notes that Six Degrees is no longer 404 and ponders what this might mean. It certainly would be interesting to see them rise from the dead.
The Fakester Revolution community now has a website. It includes the the manifesto, links to news and discussion boards and a list of who’s on the team.
With social software appearing everywhere, the news seems to be more and more curious about social scientists who are working in the digital domain.
SFGate ran an article today entitled Probing tech’s heart: Social scientists seek technology’s human side, focused on Marc Smith (MS – Netscan) and Josh Tyler (HP – email networks).
Check out Pretendster, a site that generates and manages Pretendsters on Friendster.
Michael Mandiberg is an artist that i went to school with. I often find myself referring to his work, particularly Shop Mandiberg – the piece where he decided to sell himself (and all of his belongings) in a statement about identity and consumption.
In a conversation today, i learned a new word/concept that intrigues me, but i still don’t fully grasp…. dtournement. It seems to be somehow related to parody… deconstruction… creative destruction and intertwined with the Situationists and Culture Jamming.
“It was Guy Debord and the Situationists, the muses and theorists of the theatrical student uprising of Paris, May 1968, who first articulated the power of a simple d[acute{e}]tournement, defined as an image, message or artifact lifted out of its context to create a new meaning.”
Something to figure out when i’m breathing again…
In Friendster Sucks, pt1 — Community Sharing, rmger argues for why he detests Friendster community collision, noting that failure to control what information spreads doesn’t only disempower the bridge individual, but it puts the different groups at risk simply because they have trust assumptions about the bridge’s relationship to other groups.
In order to view what was going on on other people’s bulletin boards, i created my own fake character a bit back. Needless to say, it was killed in the fakester genocide, but not before i added quite a few Friends whose posts to their B-Boards helped me understand some of the user sentiment. The manifestos come from this observation.
I have to say, i’m a bit sad to see my fake character go. I had a lot of fun crafting her and writing Testimonials based on her relationship with other fake characters. It was supposed to be simply research, but i admit that i actually found it far more enjoyable than negotiating my real identity, in part because that’s so politically limited.
The other irony is that there were actually a few people that i met through that fake character that i actually would’ve gone out on a date with, if i wasn’t so entrenched with work (and now they’re lost to the system). The creativity embedded in the conversation made those people so much more attractive than the atrocious small talk that usually accompanies most of the real messages that i get.
See, the thing is that Friendster does not get away from the coarse descriptors that make interactions peculiar and sexualized (see Sexing the Internet). When it comes to meeting people outside of the Familiar Stranger/Friend of Friend degree, the profiles collapse a person’s identity into a set of forms without much meaning. Most frequently, they give little to allow the start of a conversation. [I mean.. what am i going to say when someone writes: “Koyaanisqatsi: good movie!”]
Fake characters remove you from the ridiculous small talk into a state of activity. You have a reason to connect with someone, and you have to be creative, novel, entertaining. You get to practice your literary skills, your artistic flair. Instead of trying to articulate your identity, something actually comes out of the performance of it. The conversations are far more meaningful; they don’t have that painful explicit sexual tone; sexuality comes naturally and smoothly.
Connecting through Fakesters might not be real, but neither is going through a network full of people that you barely know, but have to articulate to maintain social face. And frankly, i’d have a lot more faith in dating someone because of their ingenuity in creating a Fakester than i would talking to someone who is arbitrarily 3 or 4 degrees from me.
There’s definitely an art to fake characters. But just like graffiti, not everyone appreciates it. Of course, the trick is to figure out how to live symbiotically. And for the high art elite to realize that there is value in the art of graffiti, just like there is meaningful dating potential through fake characters.