Meet Bill Monroe, totally bogus Facebook cyber entity that is 2 days old with already over 10 friends and rising. Everything I post is plagerized from other facebook pages. People send me messages I forward them to other random friends. I've stolen photos, interests, favourite quotes from friends of friends that leave open their pages. It's a blast! Things are always happening. I am suspicious that a few of my friends are like me, bogus manifests, others are just desperate, its a dark underbelly out there. I think maybe some people are strippers or marketing bots. Please don't add me to your real facebook account, I want to stay underground.
9 comments:
There is a great precedent to this - the famous Darko Maver incident, fully documented here ...
If anyone has more examples of virtual personas which have a real impact, please comment...
All this seems somewhat related to the Ant Farm "Eternal Frame" video where JFK suffers his "image death" and also - believe it or not - to that late 70s film Capricorn One, where a virtual Mars landing is staged, but due to a virtual malfunction, the real astronauts have to be killed...again a testament to the simulation becoming more real than reality itself...
M
hey jared, cool that you got started on this. Ive been cut off from the world of internet for the last week, so i would definitely be down with working on this with you... lemme know,
Phil
It might be interesting to end this project with electronic "death" that being simply deleting the account and then studying the traces left over in the datasphere or falsely reporting Bill's death to his friends yet letting him live on cybernetically.
considering the creepy fascinating sort of touching quality of facebook pages of dead people, I think it would be awesome to see the kinds of wall posts you could generate on his page if you tell people he died...
people can grieve for fake people, can't they?
sweet idea, anyway
Ideas from the class discussion around the Facebook project:
Issues: invasion of privacy, security, social pressure, networking.
Self-reflexive, self-presentation (mirror with tape recorder): Facebook helps reinforce what's already there (you're the author of the framework which contextualizes you) – can it be a motor for change and growth?
Creating a Facebook page in the Burroughs cut-up vein – a text created from the assemblage of pre-existing texts – not one original word – also touches on the notion of plagiarism… “Collateral language” – reorganizing language (which is the sedimentation and concretization of social rules of conduct) can be a first step towards change…
Question: what can one expect to discover through impersonation / construction of a false identity?
Infiltration of virtual spaces (such as Facebook) using the rules / guidelines established for physical spaces (see the Infiltration handout) – in order to reveal the essential properties of the medium (and perhaps why it has so much currency today)
A form of sousveillance – surveillance from the inside-out instead of the other way around.
Jared (Bill),
Can we take a look at what's happening on your Bill page? (Can that be done without adding you as a friend?)
M
Hiya Jared,
this looks so far so good, If u need help on further working on this let me know..
O
I read an interesting article in NOW Magazine this week regarding Facebook and the lengths people go to to filter their flaws and exploit their good qualities. The author suggested a "Facebook II", which is more reality based... "Facebook II would encourage us to reveal our less desirable traits. Acceptable profile pictures would include people in the throes of vomiting or sobbing or cleaning their ears with their fingers."
Not completely related to this idea, but a pretty funny and insightful read nonetheless...
http://www.nowtoronto.com/news/story.cfm?content=161754
Look how much attention this group got for example. I found this to be quite interesting, if you read through some of the arguments that the discussion boards generated...
http://yorku.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2251549037
Tis a sad story, but yet another example of the power of facebook. Perhaps we could get something like this going with Bill?
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