Day: December 8, 2010

"Did you see the Facebook movie?"
"I did. I really liked the last shot, where Zuckerberg is sending a friend request to his ex-girlfriend, over and over, just obsessively hitting 'send.'"
"He's kind of a creepy, 'smart moron,' isn't he?"
"Oh, yeah."
"And yet you spend hours every day on a site he created. What does that say about you?"
"Oh, you're just mean."

Some literary license taken here; this isn't verbatim but something like this exchange occurred. How cheap is this shot? Normally we'd say the artist is separate from the art but Facebook isn't art; it's a thing people use. Several people have told me about being stalked by ex-friends and ex-lovers on the site. The software seems to facilitate it. One is reminded of the episode of Star Trek (TOS) where Dr. Daystrom imprinted the "n-grams of his own brain" on a supercomputer. His own ambition and unacknowledged psychological quirks caused the computer nearly to destroy the Enterprise during a live demonstration of its starship-piloting ability. Perhaps we need to think more about "creator n-grams" in discussing social media and their underexamined offspring, "social media art."

Update: My own n-grams are faulty. Here's what happened in that TOS episode: "The crew watches as [the supercomputer] pounds the other ships relentlessly. The Enterprise fires on the Lexington, killing 53, then destroys the Excalibur - killing all aboard her. From the Lexington, Commodore Wesley orders the remaining ships to destroy the Enterprise at all cost...."