general

Criticism admittedly belongs to a westernized Enlightenment tradition of ferreting out and valuing truth and for some that has the taint of original sin. In the mindless silicon pleasure dome of "likes" we need this flawed practice as much as ever, though.
This blog sometimes posts criticism. If you value it, great, please keep in mind it's not written from a position of omniscience and it is hard work to apply reason to something as unreasonable as art.
If you don't value it, don't read it, or -- please, please, tell me you think it's motivated by a grudge or beef. That way I know for certain you don't value it!

Have had arguments, sometimes unpleasant, with older hipster friends about Facebook. Whereas no one aged 15-25 can be blamed that this sticky social network is their whole world, oldsters moved into the gated community by conscious choice.
How could anyone who had experienced the liberation of the open web from "old media" models circa 2001-2006 get behind this development?
Arguments included:
"Lots of people are on it now." (Lots of people also smoked.)
"Artists have to understand every part of their world, not just the parts they like." (I'd say your participation goes beyond simple understanding.)
"Hey if they can make it scale, more power to them." (The internet was already on a huge scale without needing a single network to stay up with it.)
"You can't just stop the clock, get with it." (When all your other arguments are shabby, resort to insult.)

A recent Vanity Fair article isn't concerned with any of the above, it just wants to know, will Facebook make money? The magazine absolves itself of ethical or even critical duties and passes along as objective fact the company's best predictions for itself:

The Facebook of old-—well, of a year ago-—is almost irrelevant to the company that exists today, which not only is set to change the world of social networking, but could herald the biggest transformation in American advertising since the advent of television.

That is my conclusion from months of interviews with Facebook ad clients, investors, the company’s senior management and other key executives, as well as reviews of reams of data, including confidential reports. What emerges is a portrait of a widely misunderstood company that has quietly been pioneering a marketing business model unlike any other in Silicon Valley—or, for that matter, Madison Avenue.

The premise is, as long as we can keep 'em hooked we can bleed 'em with ads coming from every direction. Sound fun? For my old cyber-hippie friends, the following quote settles whether Facebook bears any resemblance to the Net we knew and loved:

“A lot of people looked at Facebook and saw a Web site,” [early Facebook investor Marc] Andreessen remembers. “None of the people close to Mark and the company thought of Facebook as a Web site. They think of it as a data set, a feedback loop.”

If people get bored or sick of it and leave the loop, the company is screwed. Yet is twitter any better, as a place to flee? It's great to read, say, Mark Ames outside his NSFW Corporation paywall but his political observations seem thin and foolish plopped next to that Gatorade Ad in your timeline. At least when you were reading The Nation circa 1992 the ads were over in the margins and they were about saving whales, not selling disgusting sugar drinks. With Pepsico's product placements right there in your line of sight, you can't help but be reminded that controversy is delivering you into the needy hands of advertisers -- it's not just faving and liking. We all develop filters to ignore this stuff but the question is, do we have to?

The Atlantic analyzes the rise of that dumb Harlem Shake video and how much its viral nature owes to professional media fixers (pretty much everything).
The Atlantic, an established magazine, uses some street language to show that it's not part of the problem. The article's title is "How Memes Are Orchestrated by the Man." Wait, I thought you were The Man!
YouTube became the people's iTunes a few years ago* but whatever underground associations that might have had are long gone. According to the Atlantic "Google's YouTube, not Apple's iTunes, is now the dominant force in music. Nearly 2 billion music videos are viewed on YouTube every day."
Ha, ha, "viewed": a song is posted in its entirety with a still photo as visual accompaniment.
The rise of dumb memes via big-media pump-priming isn't really something artists need to be concerned with, except that new media blurs art, commerce, little guys, and big guys. When you read about the gaming for dollars such as the Atlantic describes you should be happy to be in a niche market for elite weirdos. Maybe you can get some ideas, or be negatively inspired, by how the pros are working the Net these days.

*see 1 / 2 / 3

Charles Freeman on what the US achieved in Iraq (i.e., nothing):

If the idea was to showcase the virtues of the rule of law and American-style civil liberties, then our behavior at Abu Ghraib, our denial of the protections of the Geneva Conventions to our battlefield enemies, and our suspension of habeas corpus (as well as many other elements of the Bill of Rights) at home put paid to that. These lapses from our constitution and the traditions of our republic have left us morally diminished. They have greatly devalued our credibility as international advocates of human freedoms everywhere, not just in the Middle East. We have few ideological admirers in the Arab or broader Islamic worlds these days. Our performance in Iraq is part of the reason for that.

Freeman was a first-term Obama almost-appointee nixed by the forces of darkness. The above excerpt comes from a speech given 13 days before Mitt Romney lost; long but worth a read.

Google recently added "animated" as a filter to its Images search (hat tip @ohgod).
Two years ago, the lack of this feature was seen by some as a diss of animated GIFs, or at least Google's misplaced belief that the GIF had waned in Net culture such that it didn't need to be searched.
Around the time we were arguing over the question "why are artists interested in animated GIFs?" in Paddy Johnson's blog comments, GIFs became a "thing," mostly for rips of movie and TV clips used as conversational sweeteners. They always had that function but for some reason around 2008 or so it became de rigeuer (including by me) to say that GIFs were a dotcom era vestige.
Artists had reasons for keeping them alive and we had no right to complain that Google wasn't helping us, but nevertheless, we did complain.
In looking at the available filters now in Google Images, there are five main categories, none of which cover anything we might call "fine art." Recognition algorithms seem to be corralling images into one or more of the five categories.
The classifications (under "search tools" and "type") are: face, photo, clip art, line drawing, and animated.
Let's see how they work with a museum certified type artist, say, Rosemarie Trockel.
Face - many pictures of her face
Photo - many photos of her work but also the work itself, which includes line drawings
Clip art - whoa, Ms. Trockel is not in the clip art business! Nor is any other artist trying to sell originals for thousands of dollars. Google mostly looks for graphics here, with clean lines and especially borders - including photos of some of Trockel's minimal or monochrome style works. Whoops.
Line drawing - some of her works on paper, and much stuff that isn't hers.
Animated - not too much here. Someone on Tumblr made a GIF from a documentary vimeo (nice one but, still, Trockel is not in the GIF production business either). "Animated" means animated image files, as opposed to video files, so this is not an archive of her video art.