general

Naked Capitalism has a good run-down on Facebook's experimentation with users via changes to news feeds to elicit emotional responses. This was junk science (one of the authors of the resulting paper is a Facebook employee, who may or may not wear a hoodie). But it's also the latest betrayal of users, who are constantly having settings jacked with.
Facebook, of course, is where the new media community moved for its critical discourse after the blogosphere era.
And the art world, too: just yesterday, Paddy Johnson re-published some Zucker-thoughts of Sally McKay on the work of Jeff Koons (McKay incorrectly describes his material as "ceramics" but that's a minor point).
So, what if McKay were having her news feed manipulated along with the other marks, and wrote something like "there's a lot of anger in current art." That would suck.
Of course, the Turing-complete user isn't going to rely on a Facebook feed for news. But on twitter, where I (six years ago), had the ability to control who and what I "followed," I'm now hit with additional, unasked-for information, from the expanded "media rich" tweets of the few people I follow, from the steady drip of "promoted" tweets, and from the "notifications" that constantly remind me that there is content outside my timeline to look at. I feel as I'm living over there with my finger in the dike holding back a shit-flood of propaganda. Yet, like McKay on Facebook, I'm using twitter for "crit" so, what does that say about me?
OK, here's a promise: the next time I'm invited to be in a performance event hosted by a major New York institution, I will sit cross-legged on stage, burn candles, and announce that I am going to delete my twitter, one tweet at a time, over a period of three years, until all that remains will be a single GIF (converted to mp4) of a small, flickering flame. That'll show 'em! And will likely be reverently written up.

see also
hat tips ryz and andrej for facebook paper

Update: An intrepid fact checker notes that of the Koons Banality sculptures in the Whitney show, some are polychromed wood and some are porcelain. I wouldn't use the term ceramics to describe his work but as noted, it's a minor point.

Firefox (and every other browser, it seems) desperately wants to turn the browser address bar into a search bar.
I thought I fixed this but apparently not.

To turn off the "search" function, confining it to its rightful place, the search bar, enter

about:config

ignore warning about deadly irreversible changes

and set "keyword.enabled" to false

Sick of this.

As to why posts of random Google+ users are appearing in Google News search results, the "chief architect of Google+", Yonatan Zunger, responded here. (Hat tip Jules Laplace for following up on this.) The G+ users' posts are intended to be understood as comments to the preceding news items, not news items themselves. Perhaps that should have been apparent, because they're indented and put in a box (I see that now, sort of) but Google provides no other warning that they are "random dude" comments.
Zunger sidesteps the specific criticism of why a G+ user with nothing to say and very few "pluses" is junking up front page search results. In the specific example (caution: vulgarity), the comment of "Russ Abbott" takes up as much screen real estate as six legacy news sources. I had suggested it was a rather over-large carrot to entice people to sign up for Google+, which hasn't exactly been setting the world ablaze vis a vis Facebook. Zunger's corporate happy speak position is that Google is "providing people a means to converse about the news" and seeks "to invite them into the discussion." Then why not embed comments from, say, the New York Times? Laplace asked. Google can't do that for "legal and product reasons," Zunger says. OK, sorry you couldn't get that worked out, but aren't you now creating the appearance of giving preferential treatment to your unwashed users at the expense of a credible news source? I'd like to ask -- but he's not going to go there.

Google News was never a great aggregator but it's preferable to, say, the agenda-ridden New York Times for a quick headline-overview. When the Times announced a few years back, for example, that Eliot Spitzer had "ties to organized crime" instead of reporting that he had visited a hooker, with Google News you could see at a glance how other papers were spinning the same factoid.

Lately, though, Google isn't even subtle about using News as recruiting tool for its Facebook-wannabe social media platform, Google Plus. Lambert at the Corrente blog made this screenshot showing how a random dude who happens to have a G+ account has his post mingled into search results with legacy news outlets:

Another recent change: for stories written by journalists who are G+ members, that correspondent's name appears below the headline with a thumbnail photo and hyperlink to his/her G+ page. There is also a sleekly designed pop-up associated with the hyperlink. Whereas a story written by a non-G+ member has no associated byline (and therefore no link or pop-up) in the search results. Just a little incentive for journalists to join the G+ family.

Google once billed itself as some kind of objective arbiter of web content. Not that any of us believed that, but placing its G+ thumb on the news-gathering scale is not all that different from having internet service providers creating neutrality-defying fast lanes. A minor complaint compared to other egregious practices but worth noting.

Update: As to why the random Google+ user is appearing in search results, the "chief architect of Google+", Yonatan Zunger, responded here. (Hat tip Jules Laplace for following up on this.) The G+ user's post is a comment to the preceding news items, not a news item itself. Perhaps that should have been apparent, because it's indented and put in a box (I see that now, sort of) but Google provides no other warning that it's a random dude comment.
Zunger sidesteps the specific criticism of why a G+ user with nothing to say and very few "pluses" is junking up front page search results. I had suggested it was a rather over-large carrot to entice people to sign up for Google+, which hasn't exactly been setting the world ablaze vis a vis Facebook. Zunger's corporate happy speak position is that Google is "providing people a means to converse about the news" and seeks "to invite them into the discussion." Then why not embed comments from, say, the New York Times? Laplace asked. Google can't do that for "legal and product reasons," Zunger says. OK, sorry you couldn't get that worked out, but aren't you now creating the appearance of giving preferential treatment to your unwashed users at the expense of a credible news source? I'd like to ask -- but he's not going to go there.

This post will attempt to go step by step in analyzing the proverbial slow motion train wreck of a "new media" work and criticism of same.

1. Daniel Rourke has an idea for hosting GIFs with a sound accompaniment, calling these "GIF Bites," a la "soundbites." It's a somewhat awkward concept: the GIF is looping on a tumblr page and you have to click an embedded Soundcloud file next to it, and while the Soundcloud (which has its own graphic of a cursor playing through the seismograph-like wave image) is playing, you try to focus on the GIF and imagine that it has a "soundtrack." The art is in creating correspondences, disjunctions, and rhythmic play between the sound and image. Submissions were open to the public; the Tumblr has been running from late 2012 to the present.

2. For an exhibit in a physical art gallery, Rourke was asked to do a "gallery version" of the project. He invited 50 artists to submit GIF Bites and then created a slide show which would run projected on the gallery walls. Each "slide" was a multimedia page where the GIF played continuously along with its related sound loop. Most of the GIFs were "tiled" in a grid pattern consisting of multiple copies of the same image, custom designed by Rourke to suit the idea. The basic style recalled YTMND (You're the Man Now, Dog), a popular mid-'00s "meme" site. Each page ran for a minute or so and then clicked automatically to the next page. The slide show was also posted as an online exhibit.

3. For their GIF Bite, Berlin-based new media artistes Kim Asendorf & Ole Fach took a clip from this DAYMDROP YouTube. DAYMDROPS is a self-produced video series where DAYM, a portly and ebullient black dude, enthusiastically reviews fast food (burgers, fries, etc) from the front seat of his car. In "White Castle Review," DAYM offers a "ghetto" perspective on the White Castle burger chain in reply to the movie Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Somewhat like Guy Fieri sampling diner food, but not satirically, exactly -- DAYM seems to genuinely like the food. Because Harold and Kumar are two people, DAYM invites a friend, Player, to be his tasting buddy for the video.

4. Fach & Asendorf's GIF Bite, titled "uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuegh," took a short clip from "White Castle Review," a few seconds of Player making his signature whine of pleasure as he removes a burger from its packaging. The image is manipulated slightly: Player's body is turned upside down, while an image of his smiling face is still right-side up, appearing as a square embedded frame in the lower half of the video.

5. When "uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuegh" is converted to a slide show-style page for the online exhibition of GIF Bites, the viewer is stuck, for a minute that seems like an eternity, watching a loop of a black man keening with enjoyment over fast food. Whatever humor and intelligence existed in the original YouTube is reduced to a straight-up racial caricature. This would especially be true if you didn't know anything about DAYM's videos or recognize the source of the Player clip. (I'd say it's a semi-obscure meme -- "White Castle Review" had approximately 300,000 views at the time of this writing.)

6. Paddy Johnson reviews the slideshow version on Artnet and takes offense at the caricature:

These types of predictable audio-visual pairings don’t give a user much reason to continue browsing. Others fare even worse. Kim Asendorf and Ole Fach literally drove me off the page, with their piece combining a GIF of a black man eating White Castle with a euphoric audio clip of him drool-moaning. It mocks lowbrow culture while posing as a celebration of it, and seems intended to tickle an art audience dumbly. I refreshed the page to escape that offensive contribution. Sadly, short of a hard return in the URL window, there’s no way to skip forward through the exhibition loop in search of better work.

7. Asendorf, angered by this criticism, attacks Johnson in a series of condescending (and ultimately backpedaling) tweets:

8. Despite sneering that Johnson is "so 1999" for not having comments enabled (that is Artnet's policy, not hers), Asendorf doesn't participate in the subsequent discussion of the GIF Bites show that takes place in the comments on Johnson's website, ArtFCity. Asendorf offers no coherent explanation for his assertion of a "European view on American culture" that Johnson (a Canadian living in NYC) is missing. I would say his own clumsy handling of potentially sensitive material resulted in Johnson's perfectly legit reading of his GIF Bite.

9. After Johnson complains about the slide show forcing her to stay on a page she doesn't want to view, Rourke adds a button that allows the viewer to click to another GIF Bite.