rilah

facebook’s frictionless sharing

Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” has been blowing up Google News this week (any excuse to avoid writing about the state of things, right? Most of us live on Facebook anyway.). People are angry about it because it punches a hole right through the process of the curated online persona by tailing us around the internet and posting up what we’re reading. This article compares it to “opening your entire diary,” and that just about says it all, doesn’t it? The cytomembrane of the self has become so thin and perforated that what we are consuming on the internet is now made akin to a personal reflection on life events.

The sharing aspect is not the important thing in all this, however. At this volume, nobody cares what we are sharing. We’re mature enough now that we can stop fooling ourselves about who we are creating/curating our profiles for. We stopped sharing for friends years ago. The only purpose any Facebook can serve anyone these days is a remote life record. Not a memory stream, but a scrapbook.

The aforementioned article also argues that the feature “[turns] sharing into a thoughtless process in which everything we read, watch or listen to is shared with our friends automatically.” This “thoughtless process” is what seems key to me. What does this thoughtlessness mean for expression on Facebook?

My first instinct was to cautiously celebrate it as conducive to automatic expression (i.e. the germ of Surrealism), something which I think (paradoxically) enriches and bloats the Internet marvelously. While this may be, it is disturbing to me that I unconsciously accepted the content a person consumes as a stand-in for personal expression. 

Granted, that is what tumblr is all about. And that is what makes it so hard to write about this website (and all websites, really), as Surrealist texts: There are certain compromises that you just have to make. I think there are a few ways to reblog/repost/share content that is not your own and still be expressive of yourself. (I’m going to write a list-form post exploring this; I’ll link to it from here when it’s done.) But I reject the activity as an outright replacement for creation, thought, self-reflection and exploration.

I think this is the line that my thesis is going to have to tread/explore/break and fall off of. 

the final shaggy dog

neilcicierega

“Surrealist art was inspired by the symbolism of dreams, the latent content of which could be revealed through psychoanalysis. But according to Alexandrian, in all this, surrealism is not fantasy. More accurately, it seeks ‘a superior reality, in which all the contradictions which afflict humanity are resolved as in a dream.’ Breton believed in the future resolution of the two contradictory states of dream and reality ‘into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality,’ further understood as the unity of the conscious and the unconscious.”

-Richard Coyne, in Technoromanticism

a further quote on collage

Like that other great Surrealist comic, Charlie Chaplin, Ernst operates along the penumbra of the shadow of evil, evoking eschatological endangerments as severe as famine and cannibalism while inducing laughter.

collage always does seem to have the unplaceable element of humor.

(from here)