I’ve had an ambiguous relationship with the big FB ever since reading Tom Hodgkinson’s article on the people behind the site inThe Guardian. As someone who tends towards unsociality I’ve also been a bit shy of ‘friends’, ‘likes’ and the pokesphere. Despite evangelising with clients about the necessity of getting out in the Party, and with students about the importance of FB as the space for new publishing businesses and journalism… well, I’ve not seen any clear call to become an active citizen in the FB state.
Well now I have two compelling reasons to add data to FB’s infinite archive and the Social Graph.
Firstly, I’m going to publish my PhD as a series of eBooks… one of them as an FB Timeline ‘book’ including photos and also JPEG-encoded images of the text. This eBook will sit alongside other ones (HTML5, Evernote, ePub, KIndle etc…)
Secondly, my own object-oriented photography work/practice. I’ve been photographing objects, photographing with and through objects and adding those image objects to Flickr here, here and here. By now imag(in)ing into/through/with my Timeline I can connect my image objects with the human and unhuman objects at play in that Timeline and that socio-computational mesh.
So, with my favourite cartoon (chapeau Noise to Signal) ringing in my peripheral vision:
… I hope you Like my objects (www.facebook.com/theinternationale)