I've started blogging for a new column, Art 2.1: Creating on the Social Web, for the Art:21 blog. Check out my first post:

Social technologies have been around for decades, but mainstream use of social media platforms has grown exponentially only over recent years. This column explores uses of social media platforms relevant to the arts community: by artists, art-based organizations, and the general audience. Leading off the column is a post from New York-based artist, An Xiao.

http://blog.art21.org/2009/06/25/platea-art-in-the-web-20-ethos/

Many kind thanks to Jonathan Munar and Kelly Shindler for organizing this new column and being great editors. I'm looking forward to sharing further thoughts on social media and art in future columns.

Labels: art, news

The wondrous Gillian Reagan, social media writer extraordinaire, interviewed me for a recent article in the Observer, about "The Deep Meaning of the Facebook Vanity URL". Check it out:

Out on the town recently, at cocktail parties and gallery openings, artist An Xiao has been hearing her online name, "thatwaszen," piercing through the din.

"I'll be out and about in physical space, in public, and hear my name across the room," Ms. Xiao told The Observer. A petite, 25-year-old digital media artist and photographer with thick-framed glasses and jet-black hair, Ms. Xiao explained that some of her friends have been pointing her out to guests by her "name"—the online handle she uses on social media sites like Twitter, Flickr and Blogger.

http://www.observer.com/2009/media/deep-meaning-facebook-vanity-url

Labels: internet, news

Had a Twitter conversation with a number of folks about the history of Web 2.0, i.e., the social web. According to that classic Web 2.0 resource, Wikipedia, the term was coined in 1999, to describe the advent of interactivity on the Web, rather than "screenfuls of text and graphics." And yet, as I remember logging onto Facebook for the first time in 2005, I remember how naturally it came to me, and how much it reminded me of a technology I really started using in the mid-90's: telnet and MUDs.

What are MUDs? MUDs are multi-user dimensions, i.e., role-playing games, carried out over telnet, a text-based interface that resembles, in many ways, MS-DOS. As I tweeted last night, telnet MUDs had all the trappings of Facebook--user profiles, status updates, character-limited chat, DMs, message boards and groups. In the mid-90's, a decade before Facebook, my friends and I were already obsessing over our profiles and talking about ourselves in tiny snippets in the third person.

So if Web 2.0 was already available, what's the big fuss about Facebook and Twitter? My sense is this: Facebook, Twitter and other social media services today are just like MUDs, and just like BBSes, and just like other social Internet services from the 90's, except for two key areas: (1) they're mobile and (2) they're mainstream.

This is key: the mobile aspect allows the Internet to be everywhere and everywhen. Where once we had to make a deliberate effort to connect to these services, we now have to make a deliberate effort to disconnect. Twitter itself was explicitly designed for cell phones (hence the 140-character limit), while Facebook has adapted easily to the rise of smart phones and even text-based phones.

Layer on top of that the fact that the Internet has moved away from the nerd-stigma of MUDs into the hipness of a medium touted by Ashton and Diddy, and now it's not just the geeks who are online, but everybody. Your friends, your coworkers, your family. Almost literally, everybody and their mother is on Facebook, and it feels like there's a 50% chance the people I meet at parties are Twitterers.

In my mind, it's these two factors--mainstream and mobile--that define Web 2.0 and have made our social lives and our identities one part digital and one part physical. Everyone's expected to have a Facebook profile now, and we're expected in some sense to engage with these social technologies at one level or another. And many, if not most, of us also engage while on the go, with these little phones that never leave us, effectively ensuring that no experience necessarily has to be lived out alone. It's not that the Internet defines who we are, but it certainly influences our selves to a much greater degree than before.

In any case, all the ingredients for Web 2.0 were there in the early Internet. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of proto-Facebooks in the era of Geocities and AOL. What's key is that the Internet of 2005 and later made online social media mainstream and gave it legs.

Labels: internet