So, moving on…

I Tought I Taw…

Today, I was delighted to Facebook-stalk upon a series of pictures from a guerilla project manned by a friend of mine and cohorts. It involved sprinkling a series of tweeting birds across their NYC Nolita neighborhood. But it really has to be seen to be appreciated:

Nolita Tweetie tweets, "Ate a cat. Tasted like shit. It was revenge."

From what I gather the endeavor was based in pure “why not?” whimsy, and to me it evokes a kind of tongue-in-cheek, absurd and literalist observation of the kind of amusing, disposable ephemera with which we clutter our digital world invading and occupying an actual little corner somewhere. 

Nolita Tweetie tweets, "Just had a fabulous meal with Naomi and Kate in Nolita."

I’m struck by how many fun, cheeky, hard copy leave-behind operations occur in cities worldwide. Sometimes there’s a greater purpose like the DARPA Network Challenge (if by greater purpose you mean a nice cheque for finding 10.1% of Nena’s stash), sometimes it’s the brainchild of a roomful of marketers, but the most intriguing exist for their own sake and some even ride the meme wave all the way and develop a viral life of their own (Bacon, anyone?)

Barking Up the Right Tree

All the while I think there’s the underlying notion that for all we talk of a digital, virtual, soft copy world, ever-evolving with the release of each new i-product, we still love the real deal. On a rainy day (or after viewing The Story of Stuff) I may even argue that our rampant consumerism grows from an increasing, almost fetishistic desire to stamp out a brick & mortar impact in an increasingly abstract world.   

The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Proliferation

Working in digital media, and living in an online world, it’s easy to get caught up in the virtual aspects of what we do and how we live. So easy, in fact, that it becomes refreshing and exhilerating to experience a work articulated in actual space. Particularly a work of social or political commentary, which have become the content mainstays of the blogo-twitter-insertnewfad-o-spheres.

When I think about efforts like the Tweetie birds, I often wonder what Walter Benjamin would think about the work of art in the digital age. In his 1935 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, he describes how the aura of a piece withers in reproduction, divorcing mass-produced copies from the ritual, meaning and intent of the original, and becoming ideal vehicles for political ideology.

Keepin’ It Real

The world wide web being what it is, with each new Facebook/Twitter recruit or company determined to churn out post after post to play the SEO game, sometimes we have to realize that Content isn’t always King. Sometimes Content is Clutter. In fact, more often than not, it’s clutter. And the more of us generating it and splashing it around the series of tubes, the more meaningful NOT mediating your experience can be (so put your recording device down and actually watch the concert, why don’t you?)

So while I acknowledge I’d only know of the Tweetie birds because of dear mother internet (she pays my bills, gives me ideas and tucks me in at night), I wish I could have stumbled across them the old-fashioned way: a cute little day-brightening discovery in the midst of my standard routine.

Fans of squares

I noticed dimitryz was having some fun playing around with a new beta product called flavors.me, so I had to jump in and see what it was all about. They provide a simple tool to “create an elegant website using personal content from around the internet.” I’m always intrigued by a product that sells itself on the notion of solving our fragmentation problems, so I tried it out and it made me think about the promise of consolidation in an increasingly micro-happy www.

Advantages

Over time, many of us have accumulated multiple social media accounts and while there have been free integration options for the average user to consolidate all this personal activity in one spot, they tended to be either:

• Part of a more intense site-building platform (WordPress/Drupal plug-ins, out-of-the-box solutions like Weebly, etc.) so if you don’t have the patience or energy to start or maintain a site: no consolidation for you!

Flavors.me advantage: Love Facebook? Can’t stop tweeting? Post lots of Flickr pics? Sell stuff on Etsy? Would friends keeping up with you get a serious case of Web 2.0 Whiplash? You’re all over the place, but you never set up Home (or you did, but you abandoned it for lack of time/motivation). Starting a blog or a site of your own is work (so is finding the right publishing option because there are so many out there it’s overwhelming). Pulling multiple microblogging and publishing tools together with flavours.me acts as a simple personal website that puts the micro stuff front and centre to tie everything in without tying you down to higher maintenance content updates. So if you’d rather tweet or update a status than create a page or a post, flavors.me may be home sweet home.

• Part of a single social media tool (e.g. integrating your Twitter feed or blog on Facebook), useful to a certain extent, but the ultimate goal of the provider is to get people spending more time using their service (Facebook), not to promote your multiple channels on a level playing field. So if you want to do it properly, you’re cross-feeding as much as you can on all these individual channels. And, again, if you don’t have a website or blog of your own, these efforts still don’t achieve the cohesion you may want from a “Home.”

Flavors.me advantage: As an aggregator, flavors.me is out to promote consolidating all these other publishing/networking tools, so it’s not directly in competition with them for those functions (at least, not at this stage of their business plan). While Facebook and Twitter keep trying to find ways to get “stickier,” both for publishing and gathering information, flavors.me is more in competition with free sitebuilding tools, weighing in as the slacker’s sitebuilder: slap up a bio and choose your design options/services and forget about it… Instant, low maintenance dynamically-updated Home Page!

SEOtastic

And, of course there’s the added SEO value of yet another online page with your name in the page title, linking to all your online soap boxes, large and small, in one crawltastic sweet spot. Have multiple professional blogs? Multiple Twitter accounts? Artistic ventures? Flavors.me is a simple and effective way to help search engines connect those dots and produce a simple, interactive business card, with nary a post or widget in sight.

A Little ‘Me’s Time

For me, right now I would only add two services to my flavors.me account (which hardly seems worth it, right?) for my blog and my LinkedIn profile. That’s because I wouldn’t feed my Facebook statuses and pictures onto a publicly accessible page and I don’t want to give my theatre site the same prominence as my professional stuff. And while I concede I will eventually start a professional Twitter account, I’m still knee-deep in my content plan for this blog, so I’m not there yet. While the concept of a single lifestream may appeal in theory, in practice, users may use the service to consolidate various streams into separate hubs. The heaviest users of social media are creating streams for various projects, hobbies, professional services, alter egos, etc. So if I’m into hockey and publish a host of puck-in-net-related content across platforms, and my day job is as a graphic designer, so I publish about design stuff across multiple channels, too, I may want one flavors.me page for the hockey.me and one for the designer.me, and so on, ad nauseum for all the different ‘me’s for which I have time. Flavors.me offers a quick and easy way to brand your different projects, brands, businesses, artistic stuff, etc by reeling in all the related feeds in one spot. So flavors.me‘s consolidation pitch of lifestreaming is good, but if you consolidate multiple streams, you’ll still end up with multiple “Homes” for your multiple online personalities.

What of this lifestreaming business, then?

Stream Trap

The Singularity

Seeing as much of this technology promises to make us feel connected, not just with others, but collating the different elements of our own lives and personalities, many are trying to be “the one”: the site or service that brings it all together for you in that single grand narrative. However, there are plenty of career options and personality types we can think of for whom the lifestreaming concept (in its purest form) would not be appropriate (the extremely shy/reclusive: RIP J.D. Salinger, teachers at almost every level, lawmakers, etc.). There are also people for whom it’s possible, but ultimately the best use of channels, networks and streams always come back to identity, self-marketing, and comfort levels, and, well, to each their own. And all these digital platforms trying to sell us on connectedness from the net’s infancy to now has produced a fascinating zeitgeist of championing the network over the medium or the message.

The Stream Dream

Though there are some fervent social media butterflies out there testing the furthest limits of lifestreaming, most users intuitively understand that the point isn’t to get ALL of your life online, but to use these tools to achieve certain very specific goals. For most of us, that involves projecting one (or many) side(s) of our identities using one or more of these networking and publishing tools. So the question becomes, which sides to consolidate? If you’re like me, you’ve clearly delineated your private web life (for me that’s Facebook, but some people use Twitter, blogs, etc. for personal-only purposes) from your professional web life (LinkedIn, blogs, Twitter, etc.) and use social media in a way that maintains that separation. I don’t know very many people who can participate in lifestreaming in its purest form, nor do I think it is the best way for most of us to market ourselves.

Projecting Yourself

It’s one of the things I am wary of about services that encourage young people to blur the line between their professional and private selves with a single lifestream as they go through school and enter the job market. Not all of them think of shifting or changing this strategy over time. Sometimes maintaining lines with multiple streams is the best way to brand yourself and reach the right audience for each one. To borrow from corporate or business-speak, it’s kinda like horizontal v.s. vertical integration: if you’re vertically integrated (your interests, work, hobbies are all very inter-related), a single lifestream may work for you, but if you’re more horizontal or lateral like me (have a diversity of interests across what many see as disparate worlds, even if you don’t), multiple streams will likely suit you best.

Stream of Unconsciousness

For those who flinch at Facebook or turn away from Twitter, the idea of lifestreaming seems to be precisely what irks them about all the 2.0 noise out there. To these very particular luddites, each new 2.0 venture sounds more ludicrous than the last (here’s looking at you, Blippy!) and the casual throwing about of more and more microcontent and personal information is more plague than viral. For them, flavors.me will be just yet another blight on the net, tying in the flotsam and jetsam that they proudly proclaim not to care about. I actually meet a surprising number of my peers who feel this way, and I do understand an aversion to virtualizing your social self. Every now and then I go on a media diet in an effort to focus more on real-world face time. It can get overwhelming, and these services are designed to become as sticky as possible, to slowly encroach on your time more and more. But that’s how all media has always competed for our attention, so striking a balance between our media diets and our real lives is hardly a new phenomenon (though the interactive component certainly raises the addiction level).

flavors.me: not brought to you by the letter 'u'

I’d Like to Buy a Vowel

Unsurprisingly, my biggest issue with flavors.me is that they opted for the American spelling of flavour (thus forcing me to proof this post more than usual) and haven’t at least secured the domain and established a redirect for the British spelling. In an age where so many of these services drop one or more vowels altogether, maybe they should have gone with flavr or flava instead of putting all their eggs in a regional spelling basket.

Check it Out

If you want to play, too, go to http://flavors.me/, submit your email address and click on “notify me.” You’ll receive instructions on how to sign up (incidentally, this process isn’t very clear from their write-up, which makes it seem like the service is available by invitation-only). You can then set up a page in less than 5 minutes, whether you like the concept of lifestreaming or not.

Bras of "Many" Colours (runway photo by Shattered Image Photography)

Millions whimsically played along, while a few detractors grumbled in the corner. Then, there was the usual round of aftershockers who (perhaps because they missed out on the first-round fun) posted socially aware messages in lieu of hues (donate here, post this instead, breastfeeding is good, etc.) Some criticized the campaign for deliberately locking men out of the fun (and perpetuating the incorrect assumption that only ladies get breast cancer), and many cultivated semi-mock outrage over the triviality of the campaign. What’s the point? How does this help? Right! Stop that, it’s silly. Very silly indeed.

Well, as we’re all trying to out-goose each other, I’d like to add my own ridiculous complaint to the mix:

What is up with the poor selection of bras on the market?

‘Black, blue, pink, red, beige, white and none,’ read the statuses in my feed…

What, no puce? No battleship grey, Bondi blue, burnt umber, goldenrod, vermillion or wallflower? It’s enough to make a girl want to burn the darn thing.

Do I fault the imaginations of women the world over or should I start sending letters to Victoria’s Secret? They should take a cue from cosmetics companies (now there is an industry clearly in possession of cutting edge synonym technology).

Social Investigation

Clearly, getting women to mention their unmentionables was a much-needed inquiry into the sad state of affairs that is the average lingerie line-up. All this cunningly disguised as an awareness campaign for… I forget.

But at least we can trust whoever got the ball rolling to take action: we’ve done our part, now lobby those retail giants into a greater spectrum of colours in their palettes!

Periwinkle.

As I twiddled my thumbs in a seat by the gate and slowly dozed off into my bundled-up down jacket, it occurred to me that the end of 2009 has brought about more cumulative net nostalgia than I’ve ever experienced.

The World Wide Wonder Years

XKCD's One-day Memorial Honouring Geocities

Holding hands and skipping down memory lane with the collective web unconscious started for me in October, with Yahoo shutting Geocities down, and the fitting xkcd tribute to the free site building and hosting service that so very many of my generation (myself included) used to launch a maiden voyage on the ol’ Information Superhighway.

Happy Birthday, Dear Internet!

Just three days later the last of a seemingly endless string of 40th anniversary landmarks for the internet was celebrated, with the microblogosphere all humming “Happy Birthday” and a lovely interview with Leonard Kleinrock on CNN. In it, Kleinrock perpetuates a sweet bit of mythopoeia that magically transforms the first word sent via network from the rather mundane “log” to “lo” (of “…and behold” fame.) He gets away with it because, as this hilarious classic CBC clip of the 80s/90s reminds us, “Internet” is pretty amazing.

Blasts from the UI Past

On the same day as Uranium Interactive posted this adorable flashback Christmas card (note to unilingual readers: it’s in French, but you will get it, and it’s well worth the click), The Onion releases the following video, a glorious piece of web jetsam that hyperlinked its way across the series of tubes at an astonishing rate (if my feeds are anything to go by…)

Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of ‘Friendster’ Civilization

Rest In Peace

Along with losing Geocities, a whole slew of sites became fodder for the Wayback machine in 2009. As sites have competed for online survival of the fittest, it’s amazing how much people get attached to a certain UI or look & feel. There’s something so visceral about interactive media that takes nostalgia and resistance to change to a new level (just look at the complaints in your feed the next time Facebook tweaks its UI or rolls out a new feature).

Put on The Neverending Story and I’ll get misty eyed, but load up Super Mario 3 on a DS and there’s nothing like finding that first warp whistle… With online experiences, the stickiest sites of yesteryear hold such fond memories because the joys of using, frequenting and interacting with them are part of a slowly fragmenting and shifting experience: navigating a site in its native environment.

Boulevard of Broken Memes

Content is now broken down and cast adrift as digital flotsam on the high seas of blogs, social media, apps, aggregators, etc. The sites we interact with for hours on end are reducing to a core (Facebook, Twitter, Readers, News sites, Google, etc.), many of which are becoming “too big to fail” (but like AIG, it doesn’t guarantee they won’t be the next MySpace). And as they homogenize, the UI differences, quirks and design elements that distinguished older sites from one another are no longer as disparate. While the semantic web is still a while a way, I think the 3.0 shift will eventually have us remembering Web 2.0 more holistically than we recall individual 1.0 sites now.

Pining for the Adored

So what makes me nostalgic? Well, there are so many sites and software, and so little time to write. So I’ll save some of them for a new day. But for now, I’d have to say that hearing the ICQ foghorn or uh-oh! message alert takes me right back to the days when a shrill squeal from your modem was the happy sound of successfully launching a new mission in cyberspace…

Studies are quick to point fingers at online media for facilitating obsessive tendencies, and while I agree that immersive environments have made parasocial inclinations more pervasive, I think we’ve been documenting our trouble with virtuality, self-reflection and one-way relationships for millennia (certainly since Narcissus).

Luckily for me, there are several oceans and large landmasses between myself and this person (who I assume to be one ‘w’ short of a URL) and the level of nuisance is only that of discovering ants in your living room (annoying, but not the end of the world). Many cyberstalked people have to make major life changes to return to some form of normality.

EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE

Visual approximation of my cyber-stalker

Nevertheless, it is rather unsettling to see in your stats that invasive searches are being performed or that they visit one of your sites daily. Emails and texts you can delete, calls you can ignore, and the very technology serving you this torment bails you out with a whole set of beautiful rules, blocking and automated actions. But you can’t shake that feeling of being watched, when you know someone’s out there following your every link.

So why am I blogging about it?

Well, it gets me thinking about Social Media, traditional media and our preconceptions of both. And I like thinking about those things.

PARASOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS

In university communications classes, I was taught that TV/film/etc. nurtures parasocial, one-way relationships by very virtue of the fourth wall of the screen or “passive” nature of the medium. You can see Robert Pattinson (and feel things about him, his character or his stupid haircut), but he can’t interact with you: ipso facto any “feelings” generated by his performance are yours and yours alone (I hate to break it to you, but he won’t be glittering himself up for a date with you).

Most people understand that passive interaction and the difference between reality, fantasy and mediated experiences. Of those who immerse themselves in a world informed almost totally by media, the majority of them understand on some level that they are obsessively involved as fans or what-have-you (“I’m a trekkie and this costume is made of recycled set pieces and small flakes of what eBay tells me are Patrick Stewart’s nail clippings”). Some decide that a mediated experience is what they want to enrich their lives and they are quite happy to invest time, money and energy into making their reality ape their fantasies.

But then there are the deluded few who have pathological difficulty understanding that you can enjoy them, you can fake them, you can even indulge them, but no matter how pervasive the fantasy, it still doesn’t make it real. For them, the film star or the singer is somehow speaking to them directly. All media is dangerous because it nurtures the escapist, virtual and parasocial thoughts that fuel their delusion.

ONE-WAY STREETS

While these few have a potentially clinical problem, I think every one of us can relate to parasocial feelings. They are most often what make us attached to certain mucisians, actors and brands, and marketers have been finding new ways to make us feel “connected” in a way that builds “relationships” and capitalizes on our need to insert ourselves everywhere from celebrity life stories to big name brand stories.

Tabloids alone are growing based on a celebrity’s need to expose themselves and our need to build our relationship with them, even when that relationship is negative (“OMG That Britney’s Shameless” goes the self-referential “Piece of Me” lyric.) The very notion of aspirational advertising is to sell us the dream of a lifestyle, persona or connection to a greater idea: buying this camera makes me just like Avril, punky AND girly!

THE SOCIAL ALTERNATIVE?

So, if traditional media encourages parasocial tendencies by virtue of passivity, surely interactive media should encourage more social, two-way relationships (as well as three-way, four-way, and so on, you greedy sods)? Well it doesn’t always work out that way, does it? In fact, in some ways it isn’t taking the parasocial out of traditional media, but infusing parasocial behaviour in our day-to-day lives, where it didn’t used to get much airtime.

Social networking sites are becoming a great way to project a different reality, persona or connection from your day-to-day life, and many people have remarked on how they are turning us all into wannabe celebrities within our own online communities (be they 100 or 1,000 friends strong).

Cyberbullying, stalking and obsessive, destructive behaviour start with lurking, over-Googling and other passive tactics before they graduate into active strategies. The very idea that you can assemble your relationships by friending or unfriending people is strangely possessive, and you can see how in the minds of the misguided it can go all “Butterfly Collector.”

DEATH OF PRIVACY

People have made a big hoopla over the death of privacy. That the only real privacy left is anonymity, and there’s a whole generation coming up behind us for whom the very concept of the private is alien. If it’s not in mediated space, it might as well not have happened. Young-uns hold up devices to record every concert they go to, they text while driving, the present isn’t good enough unless other people have access to it. Now.

Share it or go home.

VIRTUAL INSANITY

Luckily, we are slowly getting more control over privacy, more aware of the implications and developing a greater understanding of what our cumulative obsession with documenting our existence is doing to our experience. While I am concerned for the historians of tomorrow, who will either have to wade through a future ground-breaker’s billions of digital tidbits and micro-content or face roadblocks like wiped harddrives, unarchived profile pages, and no tangible , real-world fingerprints to go by, I am excited about our ability to shape our lives, images and “brands.” Even if there has been (and continues to be) a steep learning curve and even though it is proving difficult for those of us who cannot cope with the virtual overload.

And until we know what the greater implications of it all are, the SEO-friendly among us know how to be more visible, so theoretically we also know how to make things disappear.

I can only hope that, whether or not my cyber-stalker finds this blog (who am I kidding? It will be found), that eventually their ego and my existence can disconnect and we can peacefully coexist in the world.

A CONNECTION IS NOT A PLUG

Social media should be about interconnectedness

Our experiences online are still “mediated,” even if they are interactive, and I don’t think it’s the nature of one medium to be more conducive to parasocial than another, rather that all media brings out parasocial inclinations in us.

There are a lot of alarmists out there, but human beings have always struggled balancing their virtual flights of fancy with their mundane, rooted lives (even Madonna has had acting ambitions, poor thing). Words themselves are little drops in the virtual bucket, but it is our ability to project ourselves beyond the here and now that can get us in trouble, both online and off. Thankfully it can also uplift us and give us a greater understanding of the human condition.

I truly believe in the power of social media to build strong, meaningful connections between people, and that despite the proliferation of parasocial activity, the best interactions are still based on fostering and growing our shared bonds and collective experiences rather than contributing in name only by simply plugging project A, B or one’s sheer existence. Whether the names are of celebrities, brands, or your average Joe.