tom moody

Paul Ford in New York writes in the style of a literate prisoner snickering at the warden:

When people write critically about Facebook, they often say that “you are the product being sold,” but I think that by now we all get that. The digital substance of our friendships belongs to these companies, and they are loath to share it with others. So we build our little content farms within, friending and upthumbing, learning to accept that our new landlords are people who grew up on Power Rangers. This is, after all, the way of our new product-based civilization — in order to participate as a citizen of the social web, you must yourself manufacture content. Progress requires that forms must be filled. Thus it is a critical choice of any adult as to where they will perform their free labor. Tens of millions of people made a decision to spend their time with the simple, mobile photo-sharing application that was not Facebook because they liked its subtle interface and little filters. And so Facebook bought the thing that is hardest to fake. It bought sincerity.

Tech blogger Lauren Weinstein can conceive a day when the prison walls tumble:

My gut feeling is that Facebook saw the shadow of a significant potential competitor forming in cyberspace, and decided to nip it in the bud -- while it was still practical to do so just by throwing a chunk of money in the appropriate direction.

But how could Instagram -- no infrastructure, no income, hardly any employees -- be a threat to the 800-pound gorilla of social networking that is Facebook?

Zuckerberg isn't my idea of a good role model, but he's nobody's fool.

He knows full well what many of us have been saying for years -- that disruptive competition on the Web can appear and grow quickly at any time, and will usually be essentially just a single click away for your current users.

The Cadillac that is Facebook looked in its rear-view mirror, and realized that the little Nash Rambler of Instagram was pulling up with surprising speed.

I like Weinstein's snide take on what Instagram is:

Instagram's core technology [is] letting people take photos, pretend to be artists by applying various filters (a capability provided by innumerable other programs and apps), then sharing the results with their so-called friends and followers...

Last night at 0-Day Art's presentation at Eyebeam, the term "net art" was bandied about as if we all knew what it was.
It could be something practiced by one of 13, or possibly 14 types of actors. (See discussion with Duncan Alexander on whether the "wtf is a net artist" list is a catalog or a shrug.)

It could also mean something different depending on when it occurred, for example:

The Josephine Bosma era (early web through the Dotcom crash). Any artist interviewed by Josephine Bosma. The heyday of Steve Dietz at the Walker Art Center, or Dia Foundation's attempt at an online gallery.

The Blogosphere era (roughly 2001 - 2007). Rhizome transitions from a ListServ to a blog. Eyebeam Reblog (now kaput). Surf clubs. YTMND and 4Chan thrive as non-blog sites. Rise of Delicious and Flickr. Livejournal, MySpace collectivize the blog model, leading to:

The Social Media era (2007 to the present). Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter. Various attempts to make networking on these giant sites "performative." Trolling and friending as bullshit relational aesthetics. The economy of liking. "Aggregation" beyond the dreams of Borges.

(hat tip Lindsay Howard for Josephine Bosma link.)

Update: Add YouTube to the blogosphere era - guess it has to go somewhere. But did anyone call themselves YouTube artists the way some people (actually) tried to call themselves twitter artists? Seems like that was more of a media creation-slash-museum misfire, a la the Guggenheim's non-paradigm shifting YouTube show.

Update 2: Since I already had net art being slung around in the Duncan convo I decided it needed to be bandied about in this post.

Have been extensively re-writing this post on Guthrie Lonergan's "Professional Berry Visuals" video for several days now.

Writing about new work is hard because it's a process of figuring out

--What do I think about the work?
--Can I say it better than I have so far?
--Can I interpret without changing the work or being too "off" from its original tone?

It's especially hard when the work is nuanced humor - you don't want to overburden it with heavy spin but you also don't want to miss any of its complexity. Don't know how well I'm succeeding but I believe this is what we need to be doing as writers (or artists "reading" other artists), as opposed to heavy Facebook users' endless navel-gazing about whether likes are affecting their art.

Update: Mild epithet removed.