Funeral of your Social Experience
Group Members: Lana Abu-Shamat, Chris Carroll, Samantha North, and Scott Welsh
Over the past few years, social networking has become more and more popular with both younger and older generations as an interface to communicate and share life experience with peer groups. Facebook has many benefits such as reconnecting with long-lost companions, staying in touch with distant friends, and the ability to easily share thoughts, feelings, photos & event invitations – you name it, Facebook can do it. And who doesn’t have a Facebook these days?
We as a small group feel as if Facebook is in many ways, defeating itself. Though it aims to enrich social experience, Facebook has inadvertently caused us to become less and less social; for instance sitting at home and checking status updates instead of going downtown to see a film, or sitting at home alone chatting on “Facebook Chat” instead of meeting up for coffee and having a ‘real-life’ conversation with your best friend. You can see the disadvantages as well. How many times have you been in a group of people these days and instead of laughter and conversation, all everyone is doing is updating their Facebook status on their Macbook Pros, not talking.
Facebook is giving us all the illusion of having hundreds of friends and being supreme socialites when in reality, how many of those people do you actually even speak to? How many of those people do you commonly interact with? How many of these people know you? Does your “friends list” reflect how many friends you actually have? Not only that, but how often do we “friend” somebody just so that we can go to his or her page and check up on them or their pictures? If you left a comment every time you visited someone’s page, how different would your experience on Facebook be? Would we be as inclined to pry into other’s privacy if there were a Facebook mechanism alerting our activities to their respective page owners? What if they could see what you were doing or looking at on their page and vice versa? How is any of this helping us as human beings to interact with each other in the real world when Facebook operates on anonymity? How can it help you be a social creature when it enables us with so much invisibility?
We feel that a funeral is in order: a funeral for the imminent death of social experience as we know it. Facebook has robbed us of wholesome social interaction and that is to be greatly lamented.
Our final project will be a funeral for Facebook. We have constructed forty-four tombstones bearing the blue and white Facebook “f” that will be arranged in rows bearing fake flowers as tribute to the memory of what Facebook is taking from us. A short ceremony will be conducted where each of us will say a few words about our memories in the real world of social interaction, after which, we will bury random objects into the ground. Such as: CDs, mmaps, coffee mug, letter, and a book. The dress code is strictly black attire. This event is open to the public and any friends of real life social interaction are encouraged to say a few words about their memories of sociality before Facebook before the burial happens.
Group Members: Lana Abu-Shamat, Chris Carroll, Samantha North, and Scott Welsh
Over the past few years, social networking has become more and more popular with both younger and older generations as an interface to communicate and share life experience with peer groups. Facebook has many benefits such as reconnecting with long-lost companions, staying in touch with distant friends, and the ability to easily share thoughts, feelings, photos & event invitations – you name it, Facebook can do it. And who doesn’t have a Facebook these days?
We as a small group feel as if Facebook is in many ways, defeating itself. Though it aims to enrich social experience, Facebook has inadvertently caused us to become less and less social; for instance sitting at home and checking status updates instead of going downtown to see a film, or sitting at home alone chatting on “Facebook Chat” instead of meeting up for coffee and having a ‘real-life’ conversation with your best friend. You can see the disadvantages as well. How many times have you been in a group of people these days and instead of laughter and conversation, all everyone is doing is updating their Facebook status on their Macbook Pros, not talking.
Facebook is giving us all the illusion of having hundreds of friends and being supreme socialites when in reality, how many of those people do you actually even speak to? How many of those people do you commonly interact with? How many of these people know you? Does your “friends list” reflect how many friends you actually have? Not only that, but how often do we “friend” somebody just so that we can go to his or her page and check up on them or their pictures? If you left a comment every time you visited someone’s page, how different would your experience on Facebook be? Would we be as inclined to pry into other’s privacy if there were a Facebook mechanism alerting our activities to their respective page owners? What if they could see what you were doing or looking at on their page and vice versa? How is any of this helping us as human beings to interact with each other in the real world when Facebook operates on anonymity? How can it help you be a social creature when it enables us with so much invisibility?
We feel that a funeral is in order: a funeral for the imminent death of social experience as we know it. Facebook has robbed us of wholesome social interaction and that is to be greatly lamented.
Our final project will be a funeral for Facebook. We have constructed forty-four tombstones bearing the blue and white Facebook “f” that will be arranged in rows bearing fake flowers as tribute to the memory of what Facebook is taking from us. A short ceremony will be conducted where each of us will say a few words about our memories in the real world of social interaction, after which, we will bury random objects into the ground. Such as: CDs, mmaps, coffee mug, letter, and a book. The dress code is strictly black attire. This event is open to the public and any friends of real life social interaction are encouraged to say a few words about their memories of sociality before Facebook before the burial happens.
Thanks to SCAD students: Ana De Leon (Photographer), Andre De Matheu (Filmer), and Shorouq Ghneim (Credits)
