03 January 2010

s$#^ facebook

2 comments:

  1. If I said this was a comment on social networking via computer, I'd just be stating the obvious - so I won't (although I sort of just have - quite disingenious, right?)

    The shift in colours is quite revealing. We go from the original blue colour scheme to warmer colours. On the original screen, at the bottom of this image, there would be a host of different languages, or babel of tongues. The red blur at the bottom right hand corner obliterates all of these, showing that there isn't necessarily as much connection and sharing as we'd like to imagine going on.

    I am wondering why there are three colours in the scheme though? I was going to suggest yellow and pink were skin tones, but then the red does away with that theory (unless we see this in similarly body terms as blood - I mean, where there's connections, there's bodies, right? Maybe the red is blood and death and loss of connection).

    I think the use of a hallucinatory perception shows a different side to the facebook site, away from its advertising. The rewriting of the word 'facebook' is the central thing - this is a rewriting and re-envisioning of the whole set up which tries to re-invest it with more reality? more of an idea of the way it can cause people to become more private rather than more open?

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  2. Red blood yes, and yellow for piss. 'Taking the piss' at facebook perhaps. I was inspired to make this after I realized one of my "friends" was drunk posting. So much it shown to us by a human face, yet in facebook we see the frozen picture, the facade, the effigy, then we see the words...typed out, and the interests and the icons. But we only know these "friends" from the past memory, and we are trying to make new memories in this social networking data base. It's all v. surreal.

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