Blog 8: Adbusters

Facebook is an addiction that I satiate every single day. My presence on facebook is so important that I have notifications of activity send to my phone as text messages in real-time. Although I see nothing wrong with my addiction to this activity of measureless pointlessness, I do recognize it as a problem. I have over a thousand friends on this site, this number grows weekly as I meet more people and wish to follow up on them and vice versa. I embarrassingly admit that at events, I take pictures with full knowledge of what is and what isn’t postable on my personal page. The thought of facebook suicide is a terrifying one as many of the photos commemorating events, friendships, and memories are only available through facebook, and deleting my account would also delete my access to those well documented portions of my past. The only reason I would ever delete my facebook page would be if it interfered with my professionalism or due to my concerns with privacy and the fact that facebook is by far the book of my current life.

What does the future hold for my online socializing culture? The answer is in constant flux, I’ve had my facebook page for 6 years now and don’t consider what it was then a precursor to what it is now. There is no status quo for facebook, it is a strong corporate model that will evolve with our online habits and create the need for itself through penetrating our dependence of self-display. And even if facebook succumbs to widespread suicides, wouldn’t our need to put ourselves out there create the demand for a new similar medium?

Blog 4: Visiting Artist Darrin Martin

Wallace Stevens explains in his article, “Art, Entertainment, Entropy,” that media such as television uses dramatic elements and emotional responses to include a message possible unrelated to the narrative or content. He heavily attacks the concept of genre as the single most limiting system of classification by creating expectations of content that cannot normally be broken. He explains these concepts of his in terms of science, which are very comforting to me as a analytical scientist. His explanation of feedback loops are especially applicable to the internet phenomenon, youtube. Youtube is a case example of work creating more work as when one searches something; one will find many, if not hundreds, of the same video done by different parties. Although youtube’s genre system is not the same as film genre breakdowns, I can summarize the classification system as music videos, video blogs, candid capture, informative, and mashup. Each of these videos if inspirational enough, create an onslaught of works that only parody them. Youtube’s response video feature makes this loop very evident. Twitter and Facebook both are good examples of Steven’s give and take model represented by the laws of thermodynamics. When one posts or messages something, it almost always elicits a response of sorts. This level of causation only emphasizes that everyone has an opinion. Media such as television exploits our desire to speak out and presents imagery or situations that subliminally sell us something in return.