Just one of the many reasons I left Facebook

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/black-mirror/4od#3267363

I couldn't resist posting this...

The Dream-World of Facebook

Just before I left Facebook I left a post on my wall while I was deleting my content that told people briefly why I was leaving. In the few hours that it took me to deactivate the account my post attracted a few comments some of which were rather hostile.


In my previous post I briefly talked about how we are heading towards a globalised society that lacks nationalistic identity. Rather than finding liberation and celebrating individualism people instead have chosen or found themselves looking towards a different kind of deity or figurehead. When Steve Jobs died last month people all over the world paid tribute to him and his achievements. I am not meaning to criticise Jobs' achievements, to his credit he undoubtably had a vision and achieved a lot in his life. What I am concerned about is people identifying with someone that has little real significance in their personal lives. 


I believe Facebook has very quickly rallied this level of dedication in it's users. My renunciation of Facebook stirred comments along the lines of "Hey! How dare you criticise my Facebook." The hostility I received is testament to how much people have personally invested in this phenomena. For me, the question this poses is what does Facebook give these people that they cannot live without, or perceive they cannot live without?


In this post I want to explore the idea that Facebook is a multiplayer computer game on a scale the world has never seen. This computer game, like most others, allows us to realise a specific dream. In the dream-world of Facebook, contrary to the real world, where few of us have more than a handful of true friends,(please see Zoe Williams' Guardian article Social networking aside, how many close friends do you have?) we have hundreds of friends and they all want to know and care about everything we are thinking and doing. I want to investigate how the game-like qualities of Facebook exploit specific psychological vulnerabilities in us all.


In a culture where it is increasingly more difficult to feel heard as an individual where people feel disenfranchised by the ruling class or political elite Facebook creates the illusion that your opinions are heard. From the perspective of the user the wall places your thoughts in a continuous stream without a hierarchy. The result is a perceived single level platform where the users viewpoint is just as prominent as feeds from the international media and celebrities.


I believe the danger of this misconception of neutrality, especially within a society that feels increasingly disenfranchised, is that people begin to believe that this is an effective platform for debate. Furthermore, the very action of posting on Facebook seems to have become a kind of catharsis. Once an individual contributes to the stream it seems to satisfy their desire to be heard. 


Very much like in dreams our real-life anxieties are expressed on Facebook. However, in dreams there is no illusion of release, in a real dream our inner-conflicts are resolved so that we might better articulate them in the real world. In Facebook nothing is resolved, only pacified. 


Contrary to the popular assertion that computer games encourage anti-social and malevolent behaviour through more and more lifelike graphics and sophisticated narratives (attributing the immersive power of computer games almost entirely to the visual) it has become apparent that the explosion of social media in the last decade has added a new and potentially more powerful dimension of immersion.


In February 2010 Jesse Schell gave a talk for TED entitled When Games Invade Real Life. In his lecture Schell credits the success of a number of Facebook games to their distinct ability to exploit certain psychological vulnerabilities. Schell gave the example of Mafia Wars, a text-based game you play against your real friends. This game exemplifies the idea that a game need not rely upon life-like graphics to achieve immersion. The fact you are playing with your real friends is far more potent. Moreover, because you are playing with your real friends the experience seems more authentic. This illusion of authenticity is what I find most beguiling. 


At the beginning of Jill Bolte Taylor's 2008 TED talk Stroke of Insight she briefly explains the effect schizophrenia has on a person. She explained that when someone has this desease they are unable to take their dreams, connect them to reality and make them come true. They cannot connect their dreams to a common and shared reality so they instead become delusion. Perhaps I am being melodramatic but what I fear is that if we continue to perceive the above as authentic experience and substitute real encounters for the virtual, without practice in real-world communication, we may lose the ability to connect our dreams and thoughts to a common and this shared reality.


We must remember that real-life encounters are far more gratifying and, more fundamentally, we crave them. Think of how satisfying real interactions are. I recently reflected upon how the simple act of meeting a friend for a coffee effects my day. Even that small encounter is extremely uplifting, I relish that experience all day. It makes me happy. Do you have the same feeling from Facebook chat?


It seems as though the world in which we live is increasingly becoming virtualised - music, video, books, architecture, human relationships. Most of these migrations are quite reasonable for functional convenience but computers are not equipped to deal with the latter.


Consider human language is the source code for our brain, it allows us to operate, identify the world and our existence in increasingly abstract ways but in order for it to be useful in needs to remain significant and relevant to our experiences. If human language is a way of programming an emotional machine then computer programming is the language for a fundamentally functional machine. 


Computers have been designed to carry out operations, and thanks to pioneers in computer science since their conception they have evolved to a level of sophistication that they can carry out very complex tasks, many that we are not capable of ourselves. However, they remain creatures of function. I asserted in my last post that Facebook is a wholly inadequate vehicle for the expression of human experience and I believe this is because of the incompatibility between the language of computers and that of humans. 
(Please see the recent BBC documentary series All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Adam Curtis') 

Goodbye Facebook

I have recently deactivated my Facebook account.

I am not entirely sure when my feeling of disillusion towards the global social networking site first began to manifest itself as genuine concern. However, in this post I will try to identify some of the key factors that led to me taking this seemingly drastic step.

I think I began to feel uneasy about Facebook when I watched The Social Network earlier this year, though rather embarrassingly it was not immediately apparent to me how significant the character of Mark Zuckerberg is to everyone who uses Facebook. I do not intend to launch a hate campaign against Zuckerberg. I do not have time to engage in the trivialities of the political agendas of Columbia Pictures or Zuckerberg himself. This post is not about that.


Soon after watching the film I attended a Pecha Kucha evening at London Design Museum. There the graphic designer Adrian Shaughnessy used his time to discuss films he thought everyone should see. I think The Social Network was the last movie he talked about. Alongside classics such as Taxi Driver and Star Wars this seemed like an odd choice. Shaughnessy justified his choice by saying that despite a lack of focus on Facebook itself by understanding Zuckerberg you understand what Facebook is.


Since this talk, when attempting to summarise the film to my friends I simply explain the first and last scenes. The first sees Zuckerberg on a date with a girl that he obviously cares a lot about but through his complete social ineptitude and arrogance he insults her deeply and she dumps him. It is obvious that Zuckerberg is really hurt by this but because of his inability to express himself in a socially acceptable way he alienates her further. The final scene is quite simple and reinforces his complete inability to relate to other people in a real way. It shows him sitting at his laptop in the meeting room of a law firm refreshing that same girl's Facebook page.


Whether this is true or not does not really matter, and as I've said I do not really want to get into that debate. I'm sure all of you have spent time checking-out people on Facebook. I admit that I have but what I have begun to question is whether I really am that guy- and my answer is most definitely not. Furthermore, I am not willing to allow myself to become that person, to forfeit the ability to function effectively in person in exchange for this stunted version of living.


Alongside this I started to wonder who is Mark Zuckerberg? Even if this is not an accurate portrayal of the founder and controlling shareholder what you have to realise is that you don't know who he is. Ok, so you're thinking it doesn't really matter who this guy is. I just engage with my friends as I would normally do, it hasn't changed the way in which I behave or express myself.


I have begun to think of it this way: In a world that is increasingly getting smaller; borders between countries are becoming more permeable socially and politically; there seems to be a homogenisation of cultures taking place. It has been prophesied that in the future where once we identified ourselves by our nationality we will instead align ourselves in these socio-political terms via online communities. If we are going to align ourselves in this way shouldn't we know more about the leader? I understand that this sounds rather paranoid but I am quite bewildered by the extent to which people are willing to subscribe to such an obviously top-down regime and portray themselves with such limited prescribed criteria.


Think of the way in which you build up an image of yourself through Facebook. It is a collection of "likes", your attempts to squeeze yourself into boxes entitled "movies", "interests", etc., all of your photographs and "what's on your mind?" This is not anything new; all online profiles require this method and even in real life we create our own identity through a collection of cultural signs and symbols from the clothes we wear to who we are friends with.
What I find difficult to digest is the extent to which people contribute elements of their life to the stream and furthermore how these cultural icons have been reduced.


With Facebook there seems to be an inbuilt culture that encourages the destruction of language. Anyone who has read nineteen eighty-four will be familiar with the concept of new-speak and the afore mentioned "destruction of words". You must understand what you have lost when you choose to simply press the like button rather than spend time to tell a person what you like about them. I understand that language evolves but Facebook does not facilitate this. Instead, it encourages the substitution of complex functions in language for its own limited vocabulary of things such as "likes" and "pokes." I fear that this culture will escalate and permanently corrupt our ability to communicate the truth of our existence.


Personally I find this method of expression completely useless and an assault on the diversity of human existence. Although I am willing to accept that online social networking has some benefits it is vital that we retain our depth of language and experience until social networking evolves into something that can properly express the true complexity and diversity of human experience. Facebook as a method of portraying ourselves is a limited vehicle.


I feel that in the current canon of socio-technology progress we are too eager to surrender our human experience to the language of computers in this way.


I deactivated my Facebook account last week and left a pretty inflammatory message on my wall while I was deleting all my content (they don't make it easy!) I also attached a couple of links:


The Anti-Facebook League of Intelligentsia -

http://theantifacebookleague.com/about/

This is pretty accurate, I don't think I could put it better.

Guardian article about Facebook breaching data-protection.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/20/facebook-fine-holding-data-deleted

"the possibility to lose yourself in another person's experience."

Last Sunday I attended a talk at Frieze Art Fair in Regents Park. The speaker was the journalist and documentary film maker Adam Curtis. Who is responsible for some really brilliant documentaries such as The Century of the Self, The Mayfair Set, The Power of Nightmares and, recently All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace which was shown on the BBC in June of this year looks at how computers have colonised our world.

The subject of the talk last Sunday was to address the idea that in an age where we believe we have a clearly defined image of the world through mass media, twenty-four hour news and a plethora of pervasive devices this image is mostly restricted. Curtis describes the image we are given or receive as purely scenery or constructed scenery.

After this introduction he began his presentation with a series of questions.

1. How is this image constructed?
2. So, how are we told?
3. How do we know if it is true?
4. How do you correct something that is wrong?
5. How do you (as free but alone individuals) break through the story that has been constructed?

To illustrate he showed us an example of how this restricted view is often created. He told us that when he is researching for his films he spends a lot of time in the BBC archives but for his most recent project he spent a number of days watching Jupiter. Jupiter is the computer at the BBC that receives the unedited footage from journalists in the field all over the world. These electronic packages of raw footage are called rushes.

To exemplify how these rushes are edited down for new bulletins he showed us the rush of the funeral of a British agent who had defected to the Soviets during the Cold War. The clip we watched lasted about 6 minutes and told a really rich story; a story that could never be told in the 10 second clip that was shown on the news bulletin.

Curtis asserted that both printed and TV journalism was failing not because of the amount of free journalism available on the internet but because it lacked the tools to tell a story that really moves people.

With the amount of information available it seems that journalists lack the skill or insight "to form a coherent narrative from all the gibberish." Perhaps adding to this feeling of paralysis Curtis also noted that "it is difficult to tell someone something that isn't just the perceived wisdom."

And so my feeling is that Curtis' question is how do you cut through these preconceptions of the truth and formulate a coherent narrative that grips someone. To this question Curtis suggested that the answer to this dilemma lies in emotion and "the possibility to lose yourself in another person's experience."

This is where he believes that art-forms like immersive theatre have great potential to communicate. However, he did note that we must be aware that Punchdrunk* et al are part of the way of our time in that people take fragments and make their own story. So although the immersive theatre form does have potential to allow one to get inside another's experience it is still subject to the pitfalls of broadcast journalism and the afore mentioned inability to see beyond the perceived wisdom.

During the Q&A session one of the audience suggested that a better format for immersing an audience in the experience of another is the novel. I would tend to agree with this despite my interest in immersive theatre as a communication media. I have never come across anything in art, music, theatre, film etc. that has the power to fully surround and envelope a person in a story quite like a novel.

Curtis admitted that he did not know what new form would be the answer to this dilemma but he did agree that it would be more like a novel rather than TV.

*Curtis worked with Punchdrunk on an immersive theatre adaptation of this film http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p003x62n/Adam_Curtis_It_Felt_Like_a_Kiss_The_Film/

Unit 3B Sheffield

Before Christmas I was invited to be involved in an art project at Unit 3B by the very Hospitable Jim Howieson and Sam Bunn.

The project was to be an experiment in which myself and Jim would take turns to create work in the project space at 3B. Over the space of 6 days we would alternate a day at time each reacting, working with or providing a platform for the others work the previous or subsequent day. Sam Coordinated and acted as a provocative and rather insightful catalyst.

More Photographs are available on my Flickr stream. Click here to see.

Not even a gut wrenching

I was just looking through pictures from Charlie Kaufman's film Synecdoche, New York. That film really got inside me. It's a very strange feeling. I have seen movies that have made me really emotional. This was different. Caden Cotard's longing for his daughter stayed with me. That feeling. I am at a loss to positively identify it. All I can say is that there was not even a gut wrench. There was no stigma; just a longing.