Punxsutawney Phil is on Facebook

First of all: who else, when thinking of the lovely American tradition of Groundhog Day, has a certain Sonny and Cher song immediately pop in their head? All you Bill Murray fans out there better say, "I do! I do!" or I'll make you watch Broken Flowers over and over again until you can't move due to your smothered state of depression. A good Murray film from the 80s or 90s is capable of being remembered for it's iconic moments and infinite string of quotable lines, and today just makes me wish I had Groundhog Day on DVD. But, alas, I will have to resort to looking up key scenes on YouTube. Le sigh...



Anyway, the real reason for this post is to briefly comment on the fact that even HOLIDAYS have begun to appropriate social networking for their own purposes (via the Christian Science Monitor). And whatever a groundhog needs a Facebook page for is totally beyond me, save maybe to alert people that February 2nd is on the horizon and then on February 2nd using the page to announce whether Punxsutawney Phil has seen his shadow. But that's it. Every other day of the year, this page has no purpose. Although, Phil does have 7,572 fans, more than most Fan pages for famous humans tend to acquire. Oh, and Phil is also mobile-savvy: today, he sent out his prognostication via text message.

I don't know how many more fans he will make after this year, seeing as the "over-sized rodent" saw his fat little shadow, forecasting another 6 weeks of winter. Double le sigh...

Statement of Intent for "Imagining Language" project, plus one of the poems

Through the act of articulation and writing oneself into being, all participants are engaged in a performance intended to be interpreted and convey particular impressions.

- danah boyd from “'None of This is Real': Identity and Participation in Friendster"

This project is designed to act as a comment on the performative nature of the depictions of self that we as participants in online social networks create and compose for the online audience of our peers. By summing up our identities through a series of pre-determined categories (Activities, Interests, Favorite Music/TV shows/Movies/Books, etc.) we are actively creating our virtual selves to represent who we believe ourselves to be, taking deliberate control over the domain of first impressions and identity creation. This impression of ourselves that we are meticulously authoring is the self-approved version of our identity, the one meant for performance in the public space of the online social sphere.

However, factors of our online presence that we do not consciously maintain or construct – or usually, for that matter, even remember – such as the keywords entered into search engines like Google still compose a unique online identity and cache of puzzle pieces that comprise a more complete picture of a user. This running set of inquiries – searches tracked by Google Analytics when a user is signed into their Google account and conducts a search – that was reserved for the mind and oral culture before the advent of the computerized search engine can be seen as the portion of our stream of consciousness that accounts for all those “I wonder what, or who, or where…” moments, and in some ways makes up for our stunted short term memories. These keywords should not be seen as just a point of inception of an inquiry; they in fact make up another aspect of our online identities, an aspect that we do not then share in the online sphere of the social. Because we do not actively enter keywords with the foresight of public presentation in mind, these keywords are almost more indicative of our identities than the information on our deliberately constructed online social network profiles

Primarily informed by danah boyd’s notions of the personal performances that take place on the profile spaces of social networking sites such as Friendster, this project aims to make a comment on the constructed performance of identity that is so accepted within online social networks by publicly performing portions of the artist's Google search history and thus forcing the private into the public. These search results will be compiled into lists, poems, and possibly other forms that grow organically from the source material. The artist intends to perform these pieces in public spaces, exposing normally hidden aspects of her interests in the public sphere. In order to incorporate the online social sphere as well as the traditional public sphere, the artist will also post these pieces to her social network profiles, and will showcase the pieces on her personal website.

The artist acknowledges that she has set certain parameters for this project, given the fact that the project can evolve over time as Google is the primary search engine employed by the artist in her daily online activities. The artist has made selections from her searches, choosing what to include in certain pieces and what to leave out. It is for these reasons, along with the burden of time constraints, that the artist has set certain parameters for the project, including the following::

• Some of the pieces were constructed with the intent to have a certain cognitive flow, and include only search inquiry keywords that rhyme or fit together stylistically.
• Others will simply be presented alphabetically by the first letter of the search term, for example: all search inquiries that start with the letter “R”
• The artist omitted any Google Maps search results for businesses, locations, or addresses and limited the included keywords to images, persons, and things.
• The project, due to time constraints, was limited to the sample of keywords that begin with the letters M through Z for searches conducted between September, 2008 and February, 2009. This will be expanded over the course of the next several months to include Googled keywords through September, 2009 (allowing for the sample size = 1 year) and Googled words and phrases beginning with the letters A through L.
  

The inspiration for this project came after seeing a performance of Francesco Gagliardi’s poetry that was comprised of the outcomes of Human Intelligence Tasks (or HITs) on Amazon Mechanical Turk’s crowd sourcing marketplace. His performance took place at The Internet as Playground and Factory Conference on Digital Labor hosted by Eugene Lang College at The New School in New York City. This project is also somewhat inspired by the flarf poetry movement of the late 20th and early 21st century.

The artist plans to perform pieces from this project at an open mic night that occurs every Tuesday evening in Los Angeles, California’s Echo Park neighborhood.

Below you will find an example of one of the pieces intended for performance:

I Google

I Google images of a skinny cat
I Google guides for the MLA format
I Google what it means to be a pack rat
I Google Ratatat LP3 tracks

I Google media mass deception
I Google poodle illustration
I Google media extensions and medical questions
I Google the benefits of female masturbation

I Google MIT
I Google Why We Fight
I Google Sci-fi original movies
I Google Summer’s here and the time is right

I Google Paul Newman
I Google the intricacies of pumpkin carving
I Google Joe Shuster Superman
I Google a stick figure, crying

I Google Sergei Eisenstein
I Google Sherrie Levine
I Google Skyline, Virgin airlines, and We Feel Fine

I Google post-human
I Google Please please please
I Google Pakistan
I Google Mozzarella cheese

STUDY from Wikimedia Foundation says "Women and Wikipedia Don't Mix"

Okay, so I've heard this before: women are more inclined to participate on social networking sites than they are to contribute to an article aggregator or ranking site (Digg, for example) or to Wikipedia, and this article from the Wall Street Journal proves that again, in statistics-from-a-survey form.

I originally read about this survey on Mashable, where I found what could possibly be considered simultaneous a feminist's worst nightmare and, if you're lucky enough to be a feminist who has a sense of humor, a straight up LOLfest.

The first comment on the article was posted by "man", who had this to say:

Wikipedia has to be fact-checked and referenced, whereas women prefer to make baseless claims and get into arguments. Attempting to end the argument by referencing an actual document is only going to piss them off, the only positive result is to acquiese.

This does not mean they are always wrong, they are correct roughly 50% of the time. But no fact-checking.

And then, of course, the attacking of baseless sexism via comment threads ensues. This seems to somehow further my professor Chris Mann's point that the Internet is not a medium suited for any dialectic other than agreement. It also echos my work as the New Media Intern at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, where I am able to post an article to their Facebook page, sit back, and watch a conversation unfold. And if someone makes a sexist, racist, untrue or overtly inflammatory comment, I get to watch Planned Parenthood's supporters jump in and make sure they are aware that intolerance is not permitted. And I totally love it.

Wait a second, though. Isn't this a kind of intolerance of intolerance? Fighting fire with fire? Are these types of baseless comments just left ignored?

I suppose sometimes, supporting freedom of speech also causes one to shoot oneself in the foot. Don't want to step on anyone's toes in the process of self expression. Calling someone sexist could lead the commenter to come back at The Girl Who Cried Sexism for being a militant feminist, thus causing The Girl Who Cried Sexism to put her foot in her mouth.

Any other feet-related idioms you can think of for this?

I'm really tired and had a sudden urge to post since it's been a while, so do mind my eventual side-stepping of the main issue.

Hah!

"I don't mean to be racist or anything, but Myspace is like, ghetto"

Inspired by previous work done by ethnographer danah boyd (yeah, she's all bell hooks like that), this interesting CNN article uses Neilson data research to scan the difference in income levels of users of social media. Mostly, research has found that most young children start their social networking on Myspace and gravitate toward Facebook once they've gotten a bit older or graduated from high school. This trend seems a bit logical as Facebook started as a site only available to those with .edu email addresses, but the fact that even after almost five years of existence, expansion, multi-user inclusion and interface and usability development Facebook still caters primarily to the high school graduate is pretty intriguing. It seems that with Myspace, users not only become tired of the kitschy music players and opportunities to pimp out profiles that go horribly awry (and sometimes even crash browsers...*ehem* IE!) but, like the beat-up swing set in the bad part of town, users abandon their old stomping grounds when they find the newer, safer playgrounds on the block. And in terms of privacy settings, Facebook is indeed almost infinitely more safe than Myspace.

In terms of affluence, the sites are ranked with Twitter and LinkedIn leading the pack. This is probably due to the features of Twitter that allow users an easy outlet for their public relations material that younger or non-professional individuals might not need, especially if they are not tweeting for a company or for business purposes. And the fact that LinkedIn's homepage advertises the site as a place for "professionals" could be why a large number of users are part of a higher income bracket. Facebook follows, with 23% of their users earning over $100,000/yr., with Myspace users tending to be from the blue-collar middle class.

The title of this post comes from an interaction that boyd had with a young woman from a small town in Massachusetts, and I pretty much have to agree. As part of my internship, I have to accept friend requests on Myspace on behalf of the organization's Myspace page, and when I go to leave "Thanks for the add!" comments on people's pages, oh boy do I see a lot of trashy, ugly, flashy stuff. Most people have made over their profiles in the spirit of a horrible MTV makeover show, with bling and dyed leather and awful music everywhere. The number of times my browser slows down due to these pages would shock you.

As for myself, an educated graduate student with no income, I wonder where I fit into all the demographics. It would be interesting to look at the education levels of the individuals who use each of these sites instead of assuming that being affluent also means having a high level of education, or vice versa.