gravitymax in transition

an online exhibition that investigates the effect of social media in our culture, curated by national museum of art in athens, greece.

Tag ties & affective spies is a critical approach on the social media of our times. What happens when we are “tagging” , “posting” and “sharing” our experiences and opinions  in platforms such as those of Facebook, YouTube, flickr or del.icio.us? Are we  really connecting and interacting or are we also forming the content and the structure of the social web itself? The online works included, highlight the controversies of the web 2.0, commenting on the constant balancing between order and chaos, democracy and adhocracy, exposure and exploitation that it presents.

a slight deviation from the usual topics, this post is interesting in the social and cultural perspective. a recent washington post article reports how homeless people are using cell phones to track job opportunities, update food stamp applications, and communicate their whereabouts to others. as pay-as-you-go phone prices go down, society’s urban nomads are becoming resourceful in finding ways to get back on their feet and perhaps maintain a small amount of dignity and independence.

“Phones are really a lifeline for many people,” said Adam Rocap, director of social services at Miriam’s Kitchen, a nonprofit drop-in center for the homeless. During a string of attacks against homeless people sleeping downtown in the fall, two victims called 911 for help after they were assaulted, he said.

social collider, a google chrome experiments created by sascha pohflepp and karsten schmidt, is a javascript-based data visualization app that reveals cross-connections between twitter conversations. you enter a keyword (based on user, phrase, or trend) and a timeframe (from a day to a month), commit, then watch the tweets collide. brightly colored lines then trace related topics or replies in scribbles and spirals, connecting tiny white dots that represent individual returned tweets. and….. that’s pretty all there is to it. you can’t even cancel after you hit the collide button. but that’s the reason i like social collider. i like the fact that it is so simple that it made me think about the possible connections in and effects of my personal interactions. it would have been really boring if it’d only been about process and statistics.

With the Internet’s promise of instant and absolute connectedness, two things appear to be curiously underrepresented: both temporal and lateral perspective of our data-trails. Yet, the amount of data we are constantly producing provides a whole world of contexts, many of which can reveal astonishing relationships if only looked at through time.

This experiment explores these possibilities by starting with messages on the microblogging-platform Twitter. One can search for usernames or topics, which are tracked through time and visualized much like the way a particle collider draws pictures of subatomic matter. Posts that didn’t resonate with anyone just connect to the next item in the stream. The ones that did, however, spin off and horizontally link to users or topics who relate to them, either directly or in terms of their content.

ranging from easy to soul-robbing difficult. pc magazine saves all of us some digging (and regretting) on how to delete your account from popular social networks, online retailers, blog services, sharing services, and online services.