I once overheard a young inebriated woman on the subway around 2am state that “the real world is where you take pictures for Facebook.” She was, I thought, the smartest person on that train.

http://thesocietyp...arts-i-ii-and-iii/

I quite like this series of posts. (Be sure to read parts 2 & 3)

Here's my take on some of the concepts briefly discussed within.

I am part of a generation that has been documented extensively since birth.

Sitting in boxes in my parents' house are hours and hours of tapes of me and my brother throughout our childhood. Like most home movies, they are not entirely an accurate portrayal of how things were; they are simply the selection of orchestrated moments that my parents chose to have committed to this second order digital memory. Most of the clips are staged performances and awkward, stilted interviews- an outsider's perspective of the way we behaved. There are candid observations from far away, but whenever the camera is nearby, our behavior instantly shapes itself out of a desire to impress future viewers and conceal what we don't want recorded.

Perhaps as a result of this use of technology, my generation has taken to heart this arbiter, this constant watchful eye, in its new incarnation of digital social media. We have engineered versions of ourselves to present to the "world" of various social networking sites. We are obsessed with "documenting" that which is arguably less of a reality and more of a series of idealized and enhanced memories. We are manufacturing our own rose-colored glasses.

Near the end of my high school years I became acutely aware of a feeling that I could only describe at the time as being nostalgic for moments while they were still occurring. It might seem like an odd concept, but for me it was just the feeling of being outside myself, and the notion that my current experiences were going to be over, never to be replicated.

In our search for the real and meaningful, we are turning further and further away from it. We're erasing the significance of the present by the very act of documenting it. It's becoming too easy to create without thinking, and this hybrid of documentation and art retains the positive qualities of neither.

Thoughts?

I am replying with my iPhone. My latest art piece was a box of dead fish from Salton Sea which I poured 100 pound of portland cement and stuck a pick ax into. I might leave it on the street in downtown LA. After reading this, my next will be a hipstamatic shot of a vintage shop posted on twitter with the text saying "I am alive".

I do feel like some of this nightmare is ending, or at the beginning of that end, though not by choice. One has to wonder how tall the tower of babylon can get before it crashes down. I was just in times square and got it mixed up with ground zero. Ground zero was an advertising company I interned at. I am drunk. In New York there were "free Ai Wiewie" posters done in a Chinese propaganda style. I thought of taking a photo to send to my integrated media professor but did not. I don't take photos. I don't have a facebook. I'm cool, right?

How many hipsters does it take to screw in a light bulb?
It's a really obscure number you probably have heard of it.

What was it again? Society of simulation? Las vegas casino as a postage stamp. I hope digi-modernism ends before the term was coined.


In my defense you only asked for thoughts.