The Rhizome.org thread about Ben Davis's "social media art" essay briefly erupted into a blaze of gunfire, which many people found massively entertaining, but has returned to the calm drudgery of discussing a single example of misconstrued "social media art."
It's always fun to create grand timelines and argue about "inception dates," but one poor slob on the thread keeps insisting that if we could just agree on what went wrong with a single work, there might be a seed of a broader consensus (the work being a YouTube playlist of MySpace intros that may or may not have been art until we were told absolutely it was).
The slob's comments, in reverse order: 4 / 3 / 2 / 1
He is like the schoolteacher in the western movie that stands calmly at the bar, dodging bullets and flying tables, reading his book (OK, yes, he had an "alter" who was brawling). Won't you please go talk to him?
Update: Fair warning: there is an internet gnome who works for one of the colleges who hangs around the site telling everybody what's what--just try to ignore the advice.