Status Update: A Social Media Study
iSpeech
[Description]
In the ubiquity of the social media sphere we are littered with personal, public and commercial data. All of this content is digital memory under varying proprietary rights. We set our privacy settings to pacify our anxieties attempting to avoid malware, bot-networks and identity thefts. Yet, we relish in seemingly infinite expanse of cyberspace. The internet is our last human effort to recreate the frontier. We've constructed a virtual reality adventure with the desires of openness, anonymity and notoriety in the hopes of pursuing honest innovation as well as crime.
I am inviting you to participate in an experimental project with the goal of examining our hopes and dreams, our banality and frustrations. You don't need to do anything you don't already do. We post status updates in the hope of reaching something or someone. Why do we keep profiles of our dead alive? Why do we communicate with one another through a pseudo-public-private medium?
I would like to examine in these coming months, content generated by the status update. When isolated from the original context and represented, what happens to our message? What does it reveal about us collectively? I invite you to allow me to curate a collection of public poetry and pedestrian proclamations in strict anonymity.
This invitation is an official request to read and consider your content, the honest voyeur who asked permission, or the unqualified anthropologist looking for a new lens through which to measure the pulse of a living populace.
Some of you might be uneasy, some open, some indifferent. This is may even change our relationship status. I am in it for art. If you're in, let's see where this ride takes us, if not, this is an open invitation to block me, I don't mind, because the art will last longer than any of us anyway. Our digital records will outlive us and our privacy will one day become obsolete as more of our lives are recorded.
I draw the parallel to old books or manuscripts as you behold them one comes to understand the delicate yet powerful nature of memory.
Dan
New York City, Dec. 2012
source
Gloss