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. 

text, hypertext, cybertext

assume no connection between paragraphs— this is to be taken as a bullet-less bulleted list of definitions.

Cybertexts are pieces of literature where the medium matters. (Wikipedia)

The paradigm of the hypertext is the least powerful computational machine, the finite automaton. The prototypical cybertext is of the fourth and most powerful computational class - a Turing machine.

The cybertext is considered as a machine, “not metaphorically but as a mechanical device for the production and consumption of verbal signs.” The text/machine operates on verbal signs, requires a medium (just as a filmstrip requires a projector), and depends upon the action of a human operator.

[…] “operation” should be considered as fundamentally different than “reading,” which of course it is.

The term “interactive fiction” is not a claim that the form it describes is the only fiction that is interactive in any way. It was simply coined because interactivity and fiction are central features of this form[…].

Last year, we wasted whole classes on whether a regular old novel can be considered “interactive fiction.” Agh!

The operation of a cybertext such as Eliza is not only interesting because it results in a particular, provocative series of signifiers, but because it creates a context of operation[…].

(Source: altx.com)

“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

Musings 6/24/11 (re, esp.: collage and automata)

the subversive undermining of “established narratives” and of organic wholes by the “processes of substitution and displacement.”

i believe: elements can be deliberately created/assembled and then included in the corpus without having any deliberate or intended meaning as a part of the whole. you can write a tweet and post it to your profile: while the thought you communicated in that tweet has an intended meaning, what it adds to the text that is your profile is not something you have deliberately crafted. cannot be, else the twitter feed is not a text of surrealism (read: pure psychic automata).

ah, but must it be deliberately non-deliberate, or must it be merely non-deliberate? does a senile old man saving newspaper clippings in a notebook build a surrealist text in the same way breton does in his manifesto? does it matter, the intention? is surrealism a craft to be plied or an instinct/action which happens without the need of the creator’s consent? is the artist a creator or a channel; or perhaps the composite:  a channel for her own creation?

consider breton’s imaginary “trial”:

[…] the accused has published a book which is an outrage to public decency. […] There are all sorts of other charges against him, such as insulting and demeaning the army, inciting to murder, rape, etc. The accused, moreover, wastes no time in agreeing with the accusers in ‘stigmatizing’ most of the ideas expressed. His only defense is claiming that he does not consider himself to be the author of the book, said book being no more and no less than a Surrealist concoction which precludes andy merit or lack of merit on the part of the person who signs it; further, that all he has done is copy a document without offering any opinion thereon, and he is at least as foreign to the accused text as is the presiding judge himself.

our digital media (esp. social or expressive media platforms) are conducive to surrealist expression of the purest kind. but for it to be of artistic merit, what does it take form the user? surrender of the faculties of reason, judgement, self-censorship? or perhaps it is inauthentic for the true surrealist to even be concerned with the questions of merit/authenticity. then with what does he concern himself?

here is my distilled question, atm: is the unwitting surrealist a treacherous fake or a surrealist of the truest form?

i am in absolute awe at the relevance of Surrealist practice to the Internet as it now exists. all people who wish to consider themselves media theorists should read Breton’s  Manifesto of Surrealism and weep. i am going to write more about it (indeed, this is my thesis). just look at this for now:

[…] with every passing second there is a sentence unknown to our consciousness which is only crying out to be heard. […] Put your trust in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur.

speechless; beautiful congruencies.