I Am User Generated

As a content producer and advertiser I’m keenly aware of how all ideas are judged on their ability to be cross platformed. The questions I hear are: can it be reduced down to emailable file, can it be represented by a url link, can I watch it on my phone, iPod, and HD monitor?

In order for an idea to grow beyond it’s initial conception it has to grow virally. In order for it to grow virally it must be easily spreadable across all media platforms.

So where does this leave the art or the aesthetics of the idea. I’m thinking of artists like Chuck Close and Edward Burtynsky whose work relies and comments on scale. Do the ideas for these works die once they are cross platformed. If I’m picture messaged a Burtnsky photo does it cease to be a Burtynsky? With Manufactured Landscapes director Jennifer Baichwal shows us that Burtynsky’s work can be repurposed to a feature film, so why not an online game, a cell phone screensaver, a ringtone?

Is this type of cross platforming going to be the norm in art? I’ll use one of the most celebrated contemporary artist working today, Mathew Barney as an example. Barney’s films are sliced, and diced, repackaged and sold in bits. His elaborate sets, costumes, and soundtracks are repurposed for an art gallery setting. The film can be viewed in the theatre, on DVD or streamed online. Dealers and patrons, well being art lovers, are also business people and they understand the value of an art piece adding value to this emerging digital economy. It’s no wonder that one of the biggest art buyers, also own one of the biggest advertising agencies.

Visualization here

As a small child I remember being in church and the pastor explaining if you were truly pure then you could walk around with loudspeakers hooked up to your thoughts. Even then this notion scared me. There was no way that I could handle having my thoughts broadcast 24/7.

Well here we are in a Web 2.0 world where blogs and social networks are growing exponentially. More and more tools are being developed to help us broadcast our personal life. Is this making us more pure?

Workers are being hired and fired based on their Myspace pages. Lying about a sick day is a lot harder with GPS cell phone tracking. Cheating on your lover is a dangerous tight-rope walk with friends of friends being a lot closer to each other. Flickr allows anyone to broadcast their photos and if you happen to be in a Tahiti shot when you said you were on business in Toronto then you’re in big trouble.

With more of our personal life being more and more traceable we are forced to be just that much more transparent. Corporations are learning the hard way that they have to be totally forth coming because the access to information is just that much more pervasive.

There has been plenty written on self-representation on social networks, but as we feed more and more content into social networks and our friends add comments, photos, videos about our lives we begin to lose our agency to falsely represent ourselves and are forced to live a pure, honest and transparent online existence.

I’m positing that Facebook status updates that ask us to define what we are and Twitter that asks us what were are doing, allow us to quickly engage in small talk with our online community of friends and followers. When we meet up with these friends in an offline world small talk is no longer necessary, because these friends have been getting these updates throughout the days in between the offline meetings. A higher level of discourse can now happen without having to “catch-up” or talk about the weather.

On a world scale if we can aggregate “small-talk” with tools like Twitter, Jaiku or even some blogs then globally we can have more time for more intelligent conversation. The meeting of the minds historically has solved a myriad of problems, so I predict an extended ability to globally solve problems. The art movement of Dialogical Aesthetics is also betting on this higher level of discourse adding to social value.

Many philosophers have championed self-awareness, or to “know thyself” as a sign of more intelligent and authentic living. If these social tools are constantly asking us to define ourselves and our behaviors, then this can only lead to a more self-aware society. Combine self-awareness with a higher level of inter-personal discourse then what you get is a humanity that is more living more authentically.

One of the biggest reason for starting this blog is to have an archive of my thoughts, in hopes of being able to reflect back on where ideas, theories and creativity came from. I daily Twitter, update my Facebook status and contribute to my daily photoblog, which makes me very reflective on my immediate state of mind. This covers off the past and present, but I’ve yet to find an application that facilitates future-casting. There are so many that try to predict the future and obsess about their own personal future that a tool that facilitates that would surely be societally beneficial.

I worry that our obsession with the past and present and the amount of tools and applications dedicated to facilitating this archiving that there is no encouragement to look at our future or how our present and past acts make up our future.

I would posit this lack of reflectivity on the future was a big reason for the success of Al Gore’s The Inconvenient Truth. Mr. Gore was able to put a slide presentation that actually put some future casting into the mass media. Most mass media is not looking to the future in this blunt and simple way. When we think of the future we think of sci-fi, which approaches the future is a far more abstract way then a slide presentation, a blog or a Twitter update.

For myself I’ve used Journler for Mac as a personal diary, but I’ve now set the date to future dates in hopes of forcing myself to be critical of where I’ll be.

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