Technoprogressive Communalism: Sharing is Caring

* spreading cultural artifacts

  • accelerate advancement by corporatizing your literary output into collective units

It’s important that we progress. One of the main reasons for using social networks is that you can crowdsource your personality into the existence of others and create a sort of constructicon of online charisma. If you have friends, 10 clones of you will have many more. The corporate mode of being outdoes the posthuman in an all-too-human method of being-in-social-media achieved solely through bureaucracy. We don’t need you around, we just the description of your character. If only you’ll remain categorically consistent you could demonstrate how your self-transcending company being is far more useful than your embodied individuality.

So now online memory is a joke. It makes you laugh, but you can’t say much for how much you endorse it. Given the choice, you don’t live with it, and your statements are carefully designed to represent what you disagree with. In the culture of care every gift you receive is tailored to be exactly what you want – you are customized, your history provides the basic data for the algorithms of your future, things you want are appearing without you ever having heard of them.

A culture that gives rise to the pervasion of memes is a culture predicated on sharing and collective content.  In this unit I’d like you to practice that.

Begin simply by sharing what you would normally share on your own site(s), and to ask where that might connect with massively popular shared items, with aesthetic objects, and with what gets branded as a meme.

Thanks to sponsored spaces you can post freely, it is not about creation but optimizing the delivery of what’s commonly wanted.  And a catchy theme with impact font.

Assignment:

Share content on the website of your choice (your facebook, tumblr, personal site/blog, whatever you like).  Share between 2 and 4 times, then document/screenshot those shares to share on the course blog.

Reflection is encouraged, here are three suggested avenues for discussion in your post:

1. Can the performative/curatorial act be considered an artistic one, can the shared image be considered a work? If yes or no, discuss why/why not.

2. What, if anything, separates these shares from a meme (ie. specific sans-serif font/image combo, a certain type of content, massive distribution/popularity, and/or anything else)

3. In an age where the text and image world is continuous with mimetic content, how do these endless shares alter what might be considered legitimate acts of art and literature creation?