social media


The significane for art of the year 2008 is not limited to the market crash in October, but includes the founding of the blog Contemporary Art Daily in November, and the concurrent mushrooming of social media. Although the first and the last development have been much discussed (albeit rarely in tandem), all three have produced effects which are deeply interrelated.
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Contemporary Art, Daily (2011), by Michael Sanchez

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Wednesday, March 20th, 2013






The use of the word “social” in the context of information technology goes back to the very beginnings of cybernetics. It later pops up in the 1980s context of “groupware.” The recent materialist school of Friedrich Kittler and others dismissed the use of the word “social” as irrelevant fluff—what computers do is calculate, they do not interfere in human relations. Holistic hippies, on the other hand, have ignored this cynical machine knowledge and have advanced a positive, humanistic view that emphasizes computers as tools for personal liberation. This individualistic emphasis on interface design, usability, and so on was initially matched with an interest in the community aspect of computer networking. Before the “dot-com” venture capitalist takeover of the field in the second half of the 1990s, progressive computing was primarily seen as a tool for collaboration among people.
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What is the Social in Social Media? (2012), by Geert Lovink

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Monday, January 21st, 2013






In the 1990s, a single term came to stand for the whole range of new technologies, new expressive and communicative possibilities, new forms of community and sociality that were emerging around computers and Internet. The term was “digital.” It received its official seal of approval, so to speak, in 1996 when in the director of MIT Media Lab Nicholas Negroponte collected his Wired columns into the book that he named Being Digital. Many years later, the term “digital” still dominates both popular and academic understanding of what new media is about.
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Media After Software (2012), by Lev Manovich

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Monday, January 21st, 2013






To consider glitch art as a communitie[s].exe is to emphasize that glitches are social constructs, rather than definitive algorithms. While these communitie[s] are in a state of perpetual beta, there is still a rough consensus and a [failing] deep[er] code ++ w/feedback of consistent patterns in thematic content + iconography + discrete narrative structure[s].
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GLI.TC/H READER[ROR] 20111 (2011), by Nick Briz, Evan Meaney, Rosa Menkman, William Robertson, Jon Satrom, Jessica Westbrook (eds.)

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Sunday, December 30th, 2012