label

social media

Linked to 12 items

from: 01 Manifesting .expub (chapter)

social mediaWe publish more yet read less. We skim through titles and headlines, scroll through stories, and speak 140 characters at a time. Yet we also print, on-demand or in bulk, we decorate coffee tables, collect, beach read, we publish ourselves reading.
from: 01 Manifesting .expub (chapter)

The materials and tools for expanded publishing already exist, scattered across federated social networks, annotation tools, small-scale print collectives, web-to-print tools, and self-hosted servers. Expanded publishing is clearly positioned within the platform economy, developing practices that escape or undermine the hegemonic apparatuses. They often avoid social mediaYouTube, InDesign, Google Docs, Amazon, Twitter, and the traditional publishing industry. Instead, they work with alternative, decentralised, autonomous technology. The challenge is not invention but alignment; connecting these fragments into a shared infrastructure that fosters interoperability, sustainability, and mutual legitimacy.
from: 14 Dušan Barok (chapter)

One can see how the environment and the ways of navigating it changed over the years — I would say that in the 2010s, we lived through the era of social mediasocial media, which was sucking increasing amounts of attention. We eventually stopped clicking on those links and ended up scrolling. The scroll silos have locked us in, and the experience of the web has essentially shrunk to a handful of websites, with everything else remaining invisible or being subsumed into the platforms. Today, it’s even worse with AI. We were expected to use our critical faculties to filter out relevant social media posts and search results, but AI chatbots give us only one answer, which, by the way, is likely wrong and unsourced.
from: 13 Kenneth Goldsmith (chapter)

Kenneth 15:14 I’m Kenneth. I started UbuWeb in 1996 and things have changed a lot since then. Sometimes I find myself speaking like it’s 1998. I’m not comfortable with the developments that have happened in digital publishing or let’s just call it the digital world. social mediaI kind of feel like Instagram ate my utopia. I’ve kind of dropped out of radical publishing because I’ve become extraordinarily disillusioned with the turn that the web has taken since the advent of social media, truly the advent of Donald Trump, who ate social media as well.
from: 13 Kenneth Goldsmith (chapter)

Kenneth 18:51 It was gradual, there were so many breaking points, but I really would pin it to Trump’s rise on social media, specifically, which at first was intriguing to see the way he misused the media. At that time, I was on Twitter, and the way he misused Twitter really was modernist inflected. Completely unconscious, Joyce-ian even. I mean, this guy’s never read Joyce, but he was doing something that was sort of brilliant. It was everything I’d always hoped that social media could be, even in its perversity. Then I just realized it was the complete opposite of my utopia, obviously politically. Then it got really confused and surveilled: social mediathe space of social media became a space of surveillance, not only by the tech companies, but more disturbingly by my neighbors and my fellow citizens. You can’t make a move on social media without being surveilled. I also really do think that Zuboff’s book really opened my eyes to my naivety. I just realized at a certain point that I got everything wrong. So much of my theorizing was just completely wrong. I missed so much. I was so enthusiastic and, in the 90s, the web was just such a beautiful utopia. It was the world as I really wanted it to be, and it came crashing down. It was crash right around probably 2013, 2014, you know, during Trump’s rise.
from: 13 Kenneth Goldsmith (chapter)

Kenneth 22:32 social mediaWell, social media just ate everything. I don’t think anybody goes to UbuWeb anymore. They don’t leave Instagram. Everybody’s corralled on an app. Apps are just corralling devices that keep you within the confines of where they want you. My sense is that most people really don’t use the web anymore. They feel that they have everything they need on social media. Streaming companies, media companies, social media companies have entrapped people. So the notion of the open web, it still exists. Nobody’s stopping me. And all these notions of an undemocratic web never actually really came to fruition because actually everybody just stopped using the web. And they managed to just control and capitalize and tame the Web the way that they always wanted to.
from: 13 Kenneth Goldsmith (chapter)

Kenneth 24:10 Yeah, there’s this term that came up and I really hate it. It’s called Creator, because creators create for a platform, specifically catering to that, to monetize or to capitalize. It’s concordant with whatever oppressive system happens to be in place that they are playing to. They’re playing to a system completely uncritically, because they call themselves a creator. Whereas I had to really think about the difference between a creator and an artist. You could say that many artists are creators for the art world. Many poets are creators for the poetry industry, but that was never interesting to me. The interesting idea of an artist was somebody who went against whatever prevailing system there was as an act of resistance, as an act of real uncreativity or slash creativity. My critique on creativity was always that creativity was concordant in the way the creator is concordant. If I was to go back to uncreativity today, I would have something really equally stupid to say about creators as I did about creativity to write “creator”, “creativity”. These are terms I can’t stand. social mediaHow do we get out of this sort of “create”, “creative”, “creator” space? It’s useless because it’s monetized. Most artistic production isn’t monetized. So, it’s stupid and it’s usurped. It’s taken all of the energy out of radical forms of publishing, practice, and thinking. So it’s just not interesting to me. I get it, but it’s actually sucked all the air out of the room.
from: 12 Yancey Strickler (chapter)

alternative publishing practicesI create lower-pressure publishing experiences, first publishing in a private space, then maybe publishing it publicly later. It is interesting to think about that relationship where there’s a group of people in a private channel who are choosing to express themselves publicly. You are trying to shape some external opinion. Part of the power that I found releasing this limited-edition zip file, or even setting the initial run of copies of this book, social mediaThe Dark Forest Book, at 777 editions, is that the internet encourages us to seek infinite audiences and to imagine the entire billion people could like me today if I just wrote the right words. It encourages us to think that way, which encourages us to think in a way which is kind of disempowering, because we’re almost always going to be disappointed and we’re going to lose our voice. But instead we can flip that and say alternative publishing practiceswhat is the maximum number of people it would be meaningful to reach? And when that number is something more like 50 or a hundred or two hundred, what in the past might make us feel bashful, I think it could be an asset. It can say: “well, this is special and to own it means something.” It means to participate. There’s an opportunity to more positively frame and build relationships around the limited nature of a lot of small run media. I found that an interesting way to try to control the way the internet pulls us in ways that are unhelpful.
from: 05 Ilan Manouach (chapter)

According to referencesFlorian Cramer and Roscam Abbing’s discussion on the federated social media platform social mediaMastodon, a federation, much like a chimera, “allows diverse entities to preserve some internal rules while still being able to communicate with each other.” Silvio Lorusso, “Federated Publishing: Roel Roscam Abbing in Conversation with Florian Cramer (Report),” Making Public (blog), May 20, 2019 With Laurent de Sutter, writer and editor at Presses Universitaires de France, we had the opportunity to work together on a confederation plan for European cultural operators that could address the acute asymmetry in cultural funding across European countries and the fragmentation of different language markets and audiences. referencesIn Belgium, for instance, publishers and other book professionals are often subsidized as part of a cultural policy that supports the ongoing professionalization of cultural workers. However, this is not the case in Italy or Greece. For smaller presses, whose business model typically involves print runs of only a few hundred copies, offset printing — a technology reliant on economies of scale — makes the production of books prohibitively expensive. alternative publishing practicesThis often results in small print runs with low profit margins and high break-even points, making them either outright unaffordable or forcing the publisher to rely on print-on-demand services, staple-bound Xerox zines, or risograph printing. These alternatives, however, come with their own challenges, such as restricted print quantities and difficulties in securing widespread distribution. All of this makes it a challenge for small presses and young publishing workers (such as comics artists) to professionalize. A model of federalized publishing would allow smaller presses to collaborate and produce books that may be financially unviable to produce alone.
from: 04 THE VOID (chapter)

We started THE VOID in early 2022 when the Netherlands was still under partial lockdowns. social mediaA time when we were subjected to an acceleration and intensification of the ongoing platformization of social relations. Closed off in our private spaces, we collectively reached out to the cameras and screens attached to our devices for years already to do all sorts of things online: teaching, learning, chatting, drinking, partying, gaming, or simply hanging out. It is interesting to see this moment in retrospect as an intensification rather than the so-called “revolution” of social media and the smartphone from a decade earlier. social mediaThe visible banners of this moment were not shiny and new hardware and software that would upend all social relations as we know them. Instead, they were the admittedly boring and serious Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and Jitsi that didn’t promise us a new world but simply to continue with our everyday and boring lives and be able to see each other while avoiding physical proximity.
from: 04 THE VOID (chapter)

We started THE VOID in early 2022 when the Netherlands was still under partial lockdowns. social mediaA time when we were subjected to an acceleration and intensification of the ongoing platformization of social relations. Closed off in our private spaces, we collectively reached out to the cameras and screens attached to our devices for years already to do all sorts of things online: teaching, learning, chatting, drinking, partying, gaming, or simply hanging out. It is interesting to see this moment in retrospect as an intensification rather than the so-called “revolution” of social media and the smartphone from a decade earlier. social mediaThe visible banners of this moment were not shiny and new hardware and software that would upend all social relations as we know them. Instead, they were the admittedly boring and serious Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and Jitsi that didn’t promise us a new world but simply to continue with our everyday and boring lives and be able to see each other while avoiding physical proximity.
from: 04 THE VOID (chapter)

Moreover, the video-fication of academic and artistic research has effectively multiplied the moments of contact with the public while simultaneously decreasing their finality and their stakes. Making and publishing a video does not necessarily culminate a process, but every part of the process, no matter how inconsequential, is now potentially subject to becoming video and, therefore, public. social mediaA gesture that, let’s not forget, is that of early post-internet artists on YouTube (think Petra Cortright) as well as vloggers, video game streamers on Twitch (our unsung inspiration), sex cammers, religious mass broadcasting, and, of course, reality TV. Online video is everywhere yet remains invisible as a transparent, privatized infrastructure-as-a-service we see through, rather than a technical medium we work with to develop and publish our research practice.