How do social networks constitute a collective narrative? #catalysts

Nam June Paik, 9/23/69: Experiment with David Atwood, 1969, single-channel video, color, sound; 80:00 minutes, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Nam June Paik, Archive, Gift of the Artist’s Estate, © 1969 Estate of Nam June Paik.

“What is collective intelligence? It is a form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective mobilization of skills… My initial premise is based on the notion of a universally distributed intelligence. No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity… New communications systems should provide members of a community with the means to coordinate their interactions within the same virtual universe of knowledge. This is not simply a matter of modeling the conventional physical environment, but of of enabling members of delocalized communities to interact within a mobile landscape of signification… Before we can mobilize skills, we have to identify them. And to do so, we have to recognize them in all their diversity…” Pierre Levy

According to Levy, collective intelligence is the product of the community’s collective memory and becomes a project when the man provides the tools that allow interaction between users.

The changes taking place in our social and economic system show us that we entered in the era of knowledge and social networks are becoming more important tools for the users number. Blogs and Social networks are the expression of a writing that, more often than not, takes the form of storytelling: tell us of our existence but we also express our point of view compared to social, political, economic changes of which we are spectators / actors.

Today, social networks have revolutionized not only the way to communicate but also our lives. We interact with a global audience through internet, we are all projected into the flow of change, an epic change that has definitely revolutionized the way we conform to world.

I always use social networks to communicate and share ideas and contents.

We students at Catalysts: Artists Creating with Video, Sound, and Time, the MoMA Course by Randall Packer, we are connected one another in the study and participate together to online debate. It’s a course that provides a horizon of “augmented reality” for the knowledge through an interactive learning that takes place with non-linear and informal processes.

“This interweaving of personal sharing, storytelling, and memories, constitutes (in my opinion) an idea akin to performance and the Happening.” Randall Packer

I fully support what Randall Packer has said. Social networks have in common with the Happening the fleeting time. The Happening represents antithetical values of the academic art universe like social networks break the verticality imposed by television, which is an amalgam of informations programmed and applied under restrictive conditions, with no possibility of replication by the users considered like passive consumers of “contents” produced to cover up the truth, not to reveal it, ultimately to impose political or commercial messages. The other important aspect that connects the social networks to the Happening, it concerns the political aspect, the position of participants. They highlight or denounce social issues particularly important and critical.

“For the video artist Wolf Vostell the Television medium becomes the ready-made for excellence. In his installations, the monitors are placed between industrial waste and they become totemic objects of a social and historical condition chilling: as in Endogenous Depression (1975) with various televisions and radios encased in cement and turkeys left to wander around the exhibition.” Gabriella Parisi

I think we are in a scenario very similar to that predicted in 1984 by George Orwell and Fahrenheit 451 by François Truffaut, which highlight the idea of a centralized and dictatorial politics of the knowledge with the television medium. In Fahrenheit 451, the television is a control instrument of the power placed in all homes and it forces people to a blind allegiance to regime. Books and the magazines are considered outlaws because they help people to form an independent e personal opinion and to rebel.

In some Countries of the world, with a totalitarian State, social networks are prohibited and obscured so as to prevent more effectively the widespread diffusion of knowledge and to impose the regime’s ideas.

Just consider the fact of viral participation that social networks have taken in recent revolutions like the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Egypt, Iran. Even traditional journalism has been put into serious question by bloggers and by online readers, more and more informed and active part of the reporting process.

Italy’s “Forconi” movement – The Forconi (“Pitchfork”) movement has been making headlines in Italy for the past two weeks. On Monday, December 9, the movement called for action across the country, in the course of which town halls were surrounded, roadways blocked and train stations occupied in Milan, Turin, Venice, Bari and in Palermo in southern Italy. There were repeated clashes with police.
The protests were directed against the government led by Enrico Letta and its austerity policies, corrupt politicians, the finance ministry, rising fuel prices, the banks, the euro and the European Union (EU). They generally took place with a sea of red, white and green flags and the singing of the national anthem. The main slogan, aimed at politicians, was “Sack all of them!”

I have always used Twitter as instrument to denounce of political situation in Italy and I have protested online like other millions of Italians.  A “twitt storm” has created information, cohesion and protest movements developed later live.

Well, I believe that all social networks have the great power to create the change, the users are carriers of contents and sense, what we share has a high performative aspect, and I would add augmented and immersive, in which, through the reflection expedient in shared contents, as we do in theater and in general throughout the art, we’ll come to a greater understanding of ourselves and contingent reality.