Week 2 - Who am We? - Tim White
This session explores the braiding of social and personal in the context of social networks, the
blurring of public and private and the implications this has for the way in which we locate ourselves
as performers and audience. Works considered in this session will include Dries Verhoeven's Wanna
Play and Life Streaming, The Builders Association's Continuous City and Lucy Prebble's The Sugar
Syndrome.
Reading
Manovich, Lev. "The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Mass Cultural
Production?" Critical Inquiry 35.2 (2009): 319-31. Print.
Marwick, Alice E., and danah boyd. "I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context
Collapse, and the Imagined Audience." New Media & Society 13.1 (2011): 114-33. Print.
McNeill, Laurie. "There Is No "I" in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman
Auto/Biography." Biography 35.1 (2012): 65-82. Print.
Westlake, E. J. "Friend Me If You Facebook: Generation Y and Performative Surveillance." TDR (1988) 52.4 (2008): 21-40. Print.
READ
Social Media: Paradigm Shift?
http://www.gravity7.com/paradigm_shift_1.html
Is social interaction a paradigm shift in web and online media design? Or less a paradigm shift and
more just a nudge in the direction of the social? Though it doesn't really matter how or which we
characterize "it," it's a change in approach. For the designer it's a shift away from individual user
practices to social practices, from discrete software interactions and the software application's
satisfaction of user transactions to talk and communication, which are ongoing and may not be "goal
oriented." Human factors in social media are social factors also. The software's mediation of
interaction and presentation of users through activity and profiles, posts and appeals involves user
psychology, imagination, and the mediation of audiences that can sense presence across space and
time.
Shift of paradigm
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From individual users to social practices
User provides content, and content is people
Grounded in the personal, biographical, and the everyday
Personally and socially meaningful activities and mediated forms of talk and interaction
New modes of organizing attention
New forms of value and differentiation
New channels for messaging
New means of capturing audiences
The Social Paradigm
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User as a social Self
User as self-interested and interested in others
All activity is social (visible to some others)
Interaction is Participation
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Participation is a form of talk
Talk has new forms and languages
New forms include posts, comments, reviews, ratings, gestures and tokens, votes, links,
badges, video
New forms are distributable and communicable
Social is represented
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Social media must create and represent social interaction and community
There are no direct faces or interactions — only text, images, video, audio, and structured
activities captured in media of re-presentation
Users behave according to what they believe is going on and what they believe matters to
the audience
Users establish a relation to the audience and community based on its users, themes, and
identity
Social networking
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Social networks are the maintenance and sustaining of personal and professional
relationships on social media
Social networks limit content access to known, familiar, and trusted associations
Relationships embody trust in the first degree
Relationships extend confidence in the second degree
Social networks expand content access while limiting results
Paradoxes
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Social = anti-social
Communication = non-communicative
Self = Self Image
Other = Imagined Other
Presence = Absence
Identity = Changing
Personal tastes are highly social
Utility can be useless
boyd, danah m, and Nicole B. Ellison. "Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship."
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13.1 (2007): 210-30. Print.
[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x/epdf]
Life Sharing – Eve and Franco Mattes 2000-2003
http://0100101110101101.org/life-sharing/
«Life Sharing is abstract pornography» Hito Steyerl
For Life Sharing we turned our private lives into a public artwork. We made each and every file on
our computer, from texts and photos to bank statements and emails, available to anyone at
any time through our website.
Unlike social networks, which didn’t exist at the time, its focus was sharing. Anything on our
computer was available to search, read and freely copy, including the system itself, since we
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were using only free software.
To extend the idea of exposing ourselves through the internet we started wearing a GPS transmitter
so that anyone could know exactly where we were at any given time:
Exercise
Me and my online shadow
Talk us through your online presence, addressing
 The extent of your online presence
 How you have curated it
 What, if anything, you don’t feel comfortable showing the class
 How it differs from the person presenting
McNeil, Laurie. "There Is No "I" in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman
Auto/Biography." Biography 35.1 (2012): 65-82. Print.
"it may be difficult to determine where the human leaves off and the software begins" [66]
"these programs [eg Facebook] reenact highly traditional concepts of selves and narratives' [67]
nonymous
clipping Noun
The term anonymous(an- + -nonyma) means a person without a name or is used when the person
does not want to disclose his/her name. Similarly the word nonymous means a person
whose name is known. - http://neologisms.rice.edu/index.php?a=term&d=1&t=9877
phatic
denoting or relating to language used for general purposes of social interaction, rather than to
convey information or ask questions. Utterances such as hello, how are you? and nice
morning, isn't it? are phatic.
Authenticity
Sheryl Sandberg [Facebook COO] "You can't be on Facebook without being your authentic self"
(quoted in Kirkpatrick 199) [68]
[The Profile] asks users to provide both what it identifies as "basic" information (sex, geographical
location, email address, place of work) and more substantive autobiographical
performances" [68]
The fields for self-expression construct the ideal Facebook member's "cultural self", as Zhao et al
argue, creating a "consumer/taste identity, defined as much by what the market offers as by
individual or character traits (1826)" [70]
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Acting not only as producers of life stories, Facebook users also by necessity consume the
autobiographical acts of others, and in so doing, contribute to them: the network structure
of the site demands the persistent, symbiotic generation of narratives. these activities
position the subject in a networked auto/biography. Lives/stories on the site are
collaborations between individual users and their networks, whose presence and activities
add and inspire content." [71]
[Facebook] departs from a strictly humanist understanding of the self as autonomous, and invites us
to consider how the network can be a posthuman practice even with humanist foundations.
The private, interior life of the humanist subject, for instance, is thrown over for the
networked self, one collaboratively produced thropugh shared Facebook activities in ways
that suggest a "posthuman collectivity" in which the "'I' [is] transformed into the 'we' of
autonomous agents operating together to make a self" (Hayles 6) [72]
These networked activities that encourage mutual and ongoing production of narrative "news"
stories to share about ourselves and others complicate the conventional autobiographical
model Profiles produce by changing the traditional writer-reader/producer-consumer
relationship that auto/biographers have been used to in print culture: I write, you read.
Now, I write, you read, you respond, you write, I respond....Should users fail to reciprocate,
they risk alienating network members and violating the social norms of this particular SNS
community, actions that, as I discuss below, Facebook polices" [74]
Facebook's interest in getting its users to know more about each other is part of that search for data
its technology both produces and mines. Like cyberneticists, Facebook is invested in the self
as information in a very literal sense. SNSs are set up for ease of (corporate) data mining, a
strategy that demonstrates Haraway's point that, in an information society, "[h]uman
beings, like any other component or subsystem, must be localised in a system architecture
whose basic modes of operation are probabilistic, statistical". Once such a system is in place,
she explains, "any component can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the
proper code, can be constructed for processing signals in a common language" (163). Once
coded, "all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and
exchange" (164). Rendering our personal bits into bytes, work that the Profile initiates and
the site's overall design continues, Facebook turns the collective desire for autobiographical
representations into an information harvest. [75]
what Timeline recognises as "major life events" (Zuckerberg), must, like the Profile, reflect a
particular vision of what a significant and succesful life contains. We get some glimpses of
that ideal life and its experiences in the Timeline tutorial, which shows a drop-down menu
for such movements as "moved" or "bought a hone" and suggests that members "add a
roommate" or "a vehicle" (Lessin). Given that Zuckerberg repeatedly announces that
"Timeline is the story of your life," this computational collaboration has significant
implications for understanding the subject of social networking sites" [77]
Paraphrasing C.B.Macpherson on postmodernism, Katherine Hayles argues that the foundational
concept of the liberal humanist subject is "possessive individualism, the idea that subjects
are individuals first and foremost because they own themselves" (145) Can we say that
individuals own anything about [page break] themselves on Facebook? [79-80]
just as Haraway suggests that the cyborg renders the public-private boundary and other such
constructs untenable (151) so too may social networking sites undermine the self/other
border that auto/biography studies, for one, has long recognised as porous and unstable, as
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captured in the slash of "auto/biography". [80]
Discussion
The Authentic Self
Lucy Prebble – The Sugar Syndrome – 2003
I like the internet. I like that way of talking to people. It's honest. It's a place where people are free
to say anything they like. And most of what they say is about sex.
Dani's on a mission. She's just seventeen, hates her parents, skives college and prefers life in the
chatrooms on-line. What she's looking for is someone who is honest and direct. Instead she finds a
man twice her age, who thinks she is eleven and a boy.
Script: http://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/plays/the-sugar-syndrome-iid-126891
Reading of extract
Discussion
Manovich
Michael Wesch – The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g
Status of cultural production
PRODUCTION/CONSUMPTION – ARTIST/AUDIENCE
Connectedness
The Builders ASSOCIATION – CONTINUOUS CITY 2007CONTINUOUS CITY is a meditation on how contemporary experiences of location and dislocation
stretch us to the maximum as our “networked selves” occupy multiple locations. From Shanghai to
Los Angeles, Toronto to Mexico City, CONTINUOUS CITY tells the story of a traveling father and his
daughter at home tethered and transformed by speed, hypermodernity, and failing cell phones.
The characters they interact with pursue their own transnational business, from an internet mogul
exploiting networking across the developing world to a nanny who blogs humorous stories about
the people and places within her universe. (Read her blog here.)
The show also reaches directly into each city the production visits through a participatory website
and on-site filming to create a global and local production. CONTINUOUS CITY is about people far
from home, CONTINUOUS CITY is where we live now.
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BREAK
Braiding of worlds
Public
Social
Personal
Private
Intimate
Take the sphere you have been assigned and consider
1. The relationship, if any, it has with the other four spheres
2. Who, if anyone/thing, might or does claim ownership of your sphere
3. Has your sphere changed within your living memory and if so in what way and by what?
4. What are the bounds of your sphere and what are the consequences of violating them – give
examples
Discuss
Mapping theatre and performance to these spheres
Public
protest, street theatre cf Public vs Private health
"We call events and occasions 'public' when they are open to all, in contrast to closed or exclusive
affairs"
Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society. Trans. Burger, Thomas. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1989. Print.
More next week!!
Social
“a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the
whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space”.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Pleasance, Simon and Fronza Woods. Dijon: les
presses du réel, 1998.
Rirkrit Tiravanija - untitled 1992/1995 (free/still) - 1992/1995/2007/2011Tiravanija moved everything he found in the gallery office and storeroom into the main exhibition
space, including the director, who was obliged to work in public, among cooking smells and diners.
In the storeroom he set up what was described by one critic as a “makeshift refugee kitchen,” with
paper plates, plastic knives and forks, gas burners, kitchen utensils, two folding tables, and some
folding stools. In the gallery he cooked curries for visitors, and the detritus, utensils, and food
packets became the art. Several critics, and Tiravanija himself, have observed that this
involvement of the audience is the main focus of his work: the food is but a means to allow a
convivial relationship between audience and artist to develop.
Personal
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My Life Bits, Gordon Bell 2001Information Harvest
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/mylifebits/
MylifeBits is a lifetime store of everything. It is the fulfillment of Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Memex vision
including full-text search, text & audio annotations, and hyperlinks.
The book Total Recall (paperback title Your Life, Uploaded) is the culmination of our thoughts
regarding MyLifebits and the larger CARPE research agenda.
There are two parts to MyLifeBits: an experiment in lifetime storage, and a software research effort.
The experiment: Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime’s worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters,
memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice
recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls,
IM transcripts, television, and radio.
Private – Life Sharing,
Vito Acconci – Untitled Project for Pier 17, 1971
Enda Walsh Chatroom 2005
Enda Walsh's Chatroom is a play about manipulation, cyberbullying and adolescent insecurity. It
was first performed as part of the 2005 National Theatre Connections season, an annual festival of
new plays for youth theatres and schools. It received its first professional production in the
Cottesloe auditorium of the National Theatre, London, on 10 March 2006.
The play's action takes place in a staged representation of the virtual space of an internet
chatroom. A group of bored and restless teenagers – William, Jack, Eva, Emily and Laura – spend
their time deconstructing children’s literature and the messages in modern pop music. But when a
new member, Jim, joins to share his depression and thoughts of suicide, the conversation takes a
dark turn. The group is torn between those who want to help and those who see this as a chance
to create a martyr for the teenage population.
The National Theatre premiere was directed by Anna Mackmin and designed by Jonathan Fensom.
It was performed by Matt Smith, Javone Prince, Matti Houghton, Andrea Riseborough, Andrew
Garfield and Naomi Bentley.
Script - http://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com/plays/chatroom-iid-150719
READING
Intimate - Wanna Play
In Wanna play? (Love in the time of Grindr) Verhoeven questions the changing nature of love and
the influence of the smartphone on life in the public domain
From a glass room placed in city centers, Verhoeven interacts with users of online dating apps like
Grindr and Tinder about the nature of intimacy in our era, and asks them to visit him to satisfy his
non-sexual desires. He proposes, for example, to wash their hair, to sing together in the shower,
or to hold hands for an hour. Verhoeven’s life and search for connection is visible to everyone for
10 days, 24/7. The new public space, the internet, is made visible in the analogue public domain,
the street. Digital becomes material. The screen of Verhoevens phone is constantly projected on a
large screen; the chats can be read by everyone, but have been made anonymous: you cannot
identify the person chatting with him.
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With the emergence of dating apps such as Grindr and Tinder, a new revolution is underway: a
date is available ‘on demand’. If we know how to sell ourselves, with the right slogan and right
selfie, we have access to an endless supply of available men and women. Are we allowing the apps
to seduce us into consuming each other’s attention and sexual potential or do they simply enable
us to connect with each other much faster, while retaining the level of interaction?
One of the consequences of the phenomenon is the gradual disappearance of the Queer Village,
places where homosexuals have been meeting since the 70s, and which as a result revealed
deviating sexual preferences in the hetero-normative public space. For many homosexuals, the
dating apps are becoming the most obvious meeting place. The ‘sexual deviant’, the ‘other’, has a
distinct place in the online world. Does this also mean ‘queerness’ will be less visible on the street
of the future?
For a ten-day period, Verhoeven goes in search of answers together with the people he meets. His
findings are posted daily on a public blog, simultaneously providing the archive and
contextualization of the work.
Toward Next Week
Dries Verhoeven – LIFE STREAMING 2010
A performative installation about the ambivalent attitude to developing countries and disaster
zones. In an internet café, each spectator is in live contact via a computer with a performer 8,000
kilometres away. The performers are in Sri Lanka, on the beach struck by the tsunami in 2004, the
natural disaster yielding the greatest financial support ever. In a personal and private chat, the
performer and visitor enter into conversation about the different ways people deal with loss.
That chat, which initially appears to be an attempt to get closer to the spectator, gradually
appears to be a way to expose our empathic system. Together with the (Western) visitor, the
performer in Sri Lanka explore different levels and degradations of empathy.
Through spatial interventions, the chat changes into a physical experience. After a while, the
scents and sounds of Sri Lanka appear in the container the visitors are in. When the performers
enter the sea, a large body of water flows into the internet café container where the visitors are
sitting.
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