Social Networking sites and often things Web 2.0 are based on user content. Users contribute what they like and from it is born something that came from a little bit of chaos and a lot of great people. Take for example Twitter hash tags, they are used to organize tweets around an event or idea. A lot of folks feel the urge to formalize it, to control it. You must mold the clay in order for a beautiful sculpture to form, right? It would be cool to give 100 people each a cubic inch of clay have them make something and then put all of the pieces together. The result I bet would be really amazing. This is user generated content.
The problem is in trying to control it. Twitter is about freedom, finding a gem in the chaos. It is a side discussion to a conference or to a political march and ultimately to life. In a lot of ways I feel like the tweeter stream is more like a stream in the @jamierob way (nature) and less in the @tomfite way (computer science), it flows freely and when you try to control a river it will go right around you. The commercial entities section seems to be getting the hang of this, better than the higher ed folks. There is a mentality in education to control what kids do in the classroom and to try to control what they do outside of the classroom (you must live in the dorm your first year...)
My advice: not only can you NOT control it, but you shouldn't want to. If you really want to use the technology, just use it. Use it like everyone else, the twitter ocean is very big, and this time you aren't special (the fail whale will catch you). Not only will going with the flow bring you a better sense of the how you can successfully use the technology, but your users will appreciate you more and will be willing to interact with you.
Yesterday i posted Critical Album based on these criteria and then Mr. Bowling posted his own. He talked a little bit about playing with the typography, so i decided to add one more rule to the mix, and change another. First i did a search on flickr for Creative Commons photos (instead of most interesting), and then picked one from that page, and the new rule is: use the "Font of the Moment" from 1001 Fonts for the title of the piece. I think i would say that this is not an Album Cover but more a Hilarious piece of promotional material....
Thanks to immagina for the Creative commons photo on flickr
Cadavre exquis, or the exquisite corpse, is based on a couple of ideas, the collective unconsious, the belief (held by surrealists) that any one can be an artist, and, finally, the mystique of accident. For example, check out this: https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/download/attachments/16308/Arpcollage.jpg
It was created by Hans Arp, surrealist painter, who is said to have let the squares of paper fall to the canvas where they may and them adhered them to it. It was not intentional, it was accident they way they landed.
The actual game is based on an old parlor game played by several people, each of whom would write a phrase on a sheet of paper, fold the paper to conceal part of it, and pass it on to the next player for his contribution. The technique is said to have gotten its name from results obtained in initial playing, "Le cadavre / exquis / boira / le vin / nouveau" (The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine). These poetic fragments were felt to reveal what Nicolas Calas characterized as the "unconscious reality in the personality of the group" resulting from a process of what Ernst called "mental contagion." (Just so you know, the source of the information in this paragraph is: http://www.exquisitecorpse.com/definition/About.html)
Another technique was automatic writing, where you sit down and write for hours (usually under the influence of alcohol or marijuana, the surrealist were not adverse to altered mental states). You don't think about what you're writing, you just do it. This is how they would write their poetry. Of course, you end up with pages upon pages of unusable material which you have to sift through to find the really striking images. Anyway, it was thought that in this way you could access the unconcious. And of course, there was the dream world. See Salvador Dali.
So we played the game, the basic rules are: half of us wrote the begining of a sentence starting with If, and the other half wrote the second half of the sentence starting with Then. This is what we came up with.
If you were smarter Then I'm a Jelly Doughnut
If i were a little teapot whose spout is broken and whose handle is splintering Then Nick will be Awesome
If I were president Then i would get some delicious things
Thanks much to Tonya for introducing the game and giving me all this excellent information!
