general

"Is this the Facebook we all signed up for?" asks the hipster VJ interviewer from his desk inside the office command center on HuffPo live, a digital interview show with Skyped-in guests.
The topic is Graph Search, the new Facebook tool that mines subscriber uploads for data useful in research, dating, stalking, etc.
The guests include an activist, a philosopher, a BuzzFeeder, and a token ex-Facebook user, art world tech whiz Barry Hoggard, who makes the best contributions despite being patronized by the show's host because, eh, everyone pretty well has to be on Facebook at this point.
The NYC-based Hoggard, who runs the ArtCat artists' web hosting service, among other projects (recap here), points out that as a host (predating Facebook) he made certain pledges to customers not to exploit their data: "it would never occur to me to change my privacy policy every few months in order to increasingly use the data that people had given to me, when I was promising that I would do very little with that data. I just don't feel it's an ethical way for a company to behave."
Ethics, gulp. You can almost hear the gears grinding in the heads of the other panelists. "We have to talk about ethics, now? In connection with this service we all use and promote? What are ethics, even?"

Greg (who sent his full name and I'll revise this if he wants) emails:

I recently google searched "reaction GIF culture" just to see what would come up, and I found this post -- in which someone posts a GIF of a scene from Glee as a reaction to some inane comment about gender bias in Pokemon. Anyway, the curious thing about the GIF is that it doesn't really need to be a GIF -- in it, the girl has an expression of exasperation, but her face doesn't move, and the only things that do move are some figures in the background and immediate foreground. Someone called this a spandrel of reaction GIF culture, an analogy I'm not sure fits 100%, but is a pretty interesting concept - that of a totally useless reaction gif, seemingly only used to acknowledge that reaction GIFs are typically used in such situations.

Reply:

I like the idea of a placeholder for a reaction GIF - am also not sure if spandrel is the right word -- but this example is a classic (if banal) reaction GIF with the straightforward meaning of "long skeptical stare" or "slow burn." For that to be effective you have to know it's happening over time. The GIF gives you a sense of the room (school lunchroom [?] where people are moving around); it's fairly economical as these things go. As for its uselessness (animation vs still), the cheerleader is making herself into an "anger icon" by freezing that way, so including all the background movement makes it a fairly sophisticated joke (as opposed to overkill). As for the Pokemon issue, reaction GIFs are usually "off topic."

Twice in the last few days someone laughed when I mentioned "checking my stats." Ha ha, that's so 2004.
OK, but when your host expects you to keep your site clean of malware and spoofers ("we are not your parents, or Facebook") one ought to give at least a cursory glance at those numbers to see weird incoming URLs and sudden unexplained traffic spikes. Right? Oh well.

Anyway, I keep seeing this "twitterfeed" BS, and apparently it's just your host's way of telling you that "x number of visits came from links on twitter":

And has nothing to do with this:

As for that bit.ly-owned service ^, why would I want to "feed my blog to twitter"? Is this for folks who can't paste a blog URL into a tweet? Does anyone look for a blog on twitter?
Some people say they use twitter as a substitute RSS reader (e.g, the ancient Google Reader). I've never gotten that. Twitter is chaotic, and you follow people for their amusing daily blather, not for links to their blog posts. I get if you have a blog why you would put up links to your new posts on twitter (though it seems pretty redundant) but why would I "follow" those if I could just follow the blog (in bookmarks or on a reader)? Questions, questions. Obviously if you rely on the Zuckerberg continuum for news none of this means much. This post is for the maverick weirdos interested in carving out a space of partial Zizekian withdrawal from the most egregious aspects of the socialmediasphere (all one of us).

The bottom comment is based on an old '60s "head" joke that may or may not have survived but I like the idea of basing all criticism on the four criteria in the avianism tweet. "The painting had style and creativity and it might endure but for the absence of the dopamine factor." Or, "what this song lacks in originality, instant-classic appeal, and, let's face it, panache, is more than compensated by the awesome head rush it gives you."

Will Neibergall quotes Slavoj Žižek on electronic storage devices that consume so we don't have to -- think unwatched movies on Tivo. You get a warm glow thinking about your library that is of equal if not superior pleasure to actually watching the films. Žižek likens this invisible body of knowledge to a Lacanian "big Other," referencing, presumably, the primal mirror that continues to define you in some way as a person.

Žižek also likens Other-influence to Mexican soap operas, where an unseen director tells actors what to do through earpieces, as they are performing. In both cases someone is affected by consensual, yet secret, knowledge: as Neibergall phrases it, "the director is the big Other, dictating the rules the actors will follow as they go about their dialogue, but at the same time the big Other only exists as the sum of the practices of its subjects, who enforce it."

Neibergall (by way of Žižek) finds this self-enforced dialogue happening on the Internet, where one participates in pseudo-debates just to be doing something (interactivity!) and each of these conversations is easily shunted aside to a bookmark or half-consumed browser tab.

a lot of the talking that goes on about how artists and others relate with the internet and how the internet is affecting our social space meets somewhere with zizek’s analysis, relegating sources of inspiration and intelligent discussion to a new tab (the VCR box) while engaging mindlessly in the present business in other, more important tabs (pseudo-activity, lazy art, mindless debates, simulated criticism and scrutiny). i guess, if this is one of the ways in which the symbolic accesses lacan’s big other, and the big other is here given by the internet, we can arrive at a precise explanation of the internet as an obstacle to change and meaningful criticism in the art communities and other communities..

Neibergall concludes:

the whole attempt to understand what the internet is doing to the people (like me) who are growing up virtually dependent on it presumes a lacanian framework of social design, in which we all participate in the internet’s dominance over our lives knowing that it’s probably pulling a significant portion of the strings.

This is a weirdly circular idea: pseudo-participation gives rise to a monolithic, illusory "Internet" that in turn governs our actions. Sounds about right. Žižek proposes to challenge such a loop by pulling out of it: "the first truly critical step is to withdraw into passivity and to refuse to participate." The danger of that -- ask any blogger who has, say, de-enabled commenting -- is that people will say "dude doesn't know how to use social." So you have to be tough.