Another quote from that HuffPo Live panel about Facebook Graph Search. The topic was whether there could be a life after Facebook (laughable if you never signed up), meaning, was it possible that all the changes of privacy policy could force a mass exodus a la MySpace. As mentioned earlier, panelist Barry Hoggard is a New York art collector who also has an artist webhosting business and has been a close observer of tech changes during the last 10 years of transition from the blogosphere to the social media era, so he knows what of he speaks:
I've seen some interesting evolution of the way artists and other cultural producers have used Facebook. For a long time I was seeing a move away from individual, private websites. Artists were starting to use Facebook as if it were their new website: it's where they blogged, it's where they put up images of new works. But once they started to get worried about how Facebook could use those images, and when there are rumors about things like what it actually means or you're granting the license for Facebook to use a given image, then suddenly I started seeing artists' sites really lock things down. So artists who had moved almost everything to Facebook and weren't updating their other sites, like their blogs or their personal portfolio sites, suddenly locked down so much that I didn't have a good way to look at what kind of work they were doing now.
None of the other panelists responded to this because (i) what are artists? and (ii) Hoggard left Facebook in 2010 and therefore is a Dead Man like Johnny Depp in the Jarmusch film. But let's follow up and say yeah, what are artists if not the antennae of the race or at the very least trendspotters? Their behavior vis a vis presenting themselves and their work might have a small amount of relevance. Yours truly never joined because Facebook seemed a much less flexible and attractive means of presenting work than what I had on my BLOG. According to some, that was the mistake of the century, but then, I never found myself in the predicament of waking up one day feeling stranded in a world not of my own making, surrounded by stalkers and faux friends, with all my art and writing on servers run by Machiavellian data leeches.
