IN YOUR FACE - end notes

Last week, in reaction to what I saw as the potentially lethal growing virus of bland mediocrity, also known as the FACEBOOK WALL, I launched an investigative performance real-time project called IN YOUR FACE.

For forty-eight hours I responded to the really stupid and what I saw as completely useless entries with what I felt to be honest, insightful, and challenging feedback. I did this in an effort to try to break people out of their FACEBOOK orbit and hopefully elicit a more meaningful exchange that would further investigate what FACEBOOK is really about as a technology of communication (and not just a "social networking" site, which really doesn't mean anything if you think about it for more than three seconds).

Here are the results.

With the exception of Susan Johnson (who admitted that she had written a worthless comment and then encouraged me to vote on the Netflix Find Your Voice contest, which I did) the replies to my reply were either extremely hostile and inarticulate, or articulate and just as banal as the original comments made by the users.

After my first volley of comments I avoided using FACEBOOK for the rest of the forty-eight hours, and did not read any of the replies to my replies which were forwarded to my GMail account. I avoided FACEBOOK because I felt ashamed, and I didn't read any of the re-response comments because I was embarrassed and felt as though anything I re-re-re-responded wouldn't be of any use or further any sort of meaningful exchange.

Conclusions: I was surprised with how upset people seemed to get when I told them their wall comments were boring and useless. The reactions I read seemed to indicate that people, when they comment about how they've just watched Battlestar Gallactica, or bought a latte, really have a lot of emotion invested. My impression of FACEBOOK was that it's mostly a diversion, a waste of time, and the comments people make are either to promote something or just fill in the void so they can feel that they are "connecting" to something greater than themselves in real time. I now feel that things are much worse. It seems that FACEBOOK is being appropriated for a huge ego interface, that commenting on the buying of latte is actually signifying a real world weight of existence that goes beyond the mere checking in and checking out that the "social networking" site was designed for. In the real world you would never make these comments to your friends, or if you did you would make them without any sort of emotional/identity affirming expectations. It looks as though however in the artificially removed world of FACEBOOK, the banal is really transmuting into something much more powerful.

To dumb it down, it looks like really boring people are making really boring posts to try to either rationalize or transcend their own boring natures. Fascinating. Essentially I was wrong with my assumption that I could challenge and agitate people into a "more meaningful" exchange. There perhaps isn't a conservative social rules-of-manners at play on this site. What you see, is what you get, and that fact that it really isn't much could in fact be the "more meaningful" truth behind actual real world social interactions.

What I've learned from this performance project is that I'll be avoiding FACEBOOK as much as possible. It's too real, too direct. I think I need the rose colored glasses and glamour of real life interactions. I'll still try to promote mmmmmongrel because, why not, it's free. As far as the question of trolling, the question of whether or not the definition of trolling of inaccurate and that maybe Internet trolls are much more useful and positive and important to the world of the web -- I'm still not sure. This will have to be explored in a future project. If anyone has any ideas I'd love to hear them. If not I'll put on my thinking cap and let you all know when I've come up with something.