I Am User Generated

I have the utmost respect for what Banksy has been able to do with legitimizing graffiti as a valid form of contemporary art, however he may have met his match or perhaps his greatest collaborator in Grey Ghost.

In Murketing today Rob Walker published a post about the anti-graf zealot Fred Radtke aka Grey Ghost. Radtke is well known in the graffiti scene in New Orleans for covering up graffiti. These square blocks of neutral color have become tags unto themselves. This is further evidenced when Grey Ghost only partially covered up a Banksy N.O. work. If he truly hated graffiti then he would have covered everything. Instead he has put his story touch on this tale and entered into dialogue with Banksy. 

As I Am User Generated regular reader’s will know, I’m keenly interested in one’s own ability to create their own celebrity online.  Now there is a tool for gauging our celebrity, or at least our own obsession with our own celebrity. Vanity Validator is a tool that Chris Anderson developed which use’s Google’s Page Rank to calculate anyone’s online presence. I’m happy to report that I score a healthy 62 out of a possible 100.

The Aesthetic Poetic and myself have been talking a lot about how the larger Internet community perceive us and the content we produce.

Wordle is a great visualization tool that helps in this quest as in scraps URLs for keywords then visualizes them. This word cloud can be seen as a visualization of how I am being perceived over at JamesChutter.com

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.