characters:
FREE BOUNCY RIDE OF THE WEEK
See you next week for another Free Bouncy Ride
I’d much rather descend into the dark and drippy caverns of the NYC subway system and encounter half-humorous, half-disturbing shit like this than have to deal with driving every morning. I can’t imagine doing that every morning—those who do are truly special…(ed).
I’ve watched the best minds of my generation destroyed by mindless commuting back and forth from cubicle coffins…
The only time they spent alone was in a car, battling traffic.
No wonder the commuters hate the city…they fight so hard to get there and the version they get is Penn Station’s rabbit warrens, or the psychotic glimmer of the Port Authority. Everything is rush, rush, rush…stuck in crowds of people who are doing the same—wearing identical clothes and identical grim countenances. They flow in the river of people towards the subways—I remember being already on the train when we got to 34th street, and watching them come on with their determined faces and overstuffed laptop bags. They are missing out on a great New York moment—which is riding the trains without a bag and nothing in your pocket except your metro card and a couple of dollars.
Sit back and if there’s room stretch your arms out on either side—feel the cool plastic of the seat against your ass and the rattle of metal over your head.
Fuck a car!
Here is one of my latest #FTW Shirts: “Cult Adds Life to Everything Nice”. These shirts are one-of-a-kind graffitied vintage shirts that I make especially for an individual based on the character they play on Twitter. Read more here.
I call this: ALTER-EGO
An artwork that was featured in our group exhibit last year.
Recently, I had an idea that I keep coming back to—a Matrix-inspired notion that we, as humans are the flowering fruit and technology is the plant. While we grow, blossom and die they upload and update—creating off-shoots via cut/copy. We live connected to one another via their long green stalks, eventually shrivilling up and rotting on the ground while they live for hundreds of years like trees…
I keep coming back to this idea because as nighmarish as its initial resonances might be, the act of contemplating it acts like a springboard into an innerworld of endless corridors, each lined with doors leading to new realities.
“Getting” Twitter at the NYC 140 Characters Conference
(picture courtesy of Brian Solis)
The Twitter 140 Characters Conference in NYC this week was for, by and about those who “get” Twitter. There were many different types of people in attendance—from bonafide celebrities and prominent business leaders to music critics, marketers and unemployed artists/internet philosophers such as myself. Yet as varied as our individual bios might be we all represent a growing community of power-users: early adopters and next level thinkers united by our passion and enthusiasm for the possibilities created by a new way of communicating.
What’s interesting is that while “getting it” was referred to in nearly every panel and presentation, there seemed to be little consensus about what “getting” Twitter actually means. For some, it was about using Twitter primarily as a conversation tool. For others, “getting it” was about listening. For still others it was about “broadsharing”—a term coined by Vincent Hunt that I quite like—and the power of retweeted links. During the spirited and already infamous panel, “The Effects of Twitter on News Gathering”, Ann Curry claimed to “get” Twitter by embracing it as journalistic tool for finding out the factual truth, while Tim O’Reilly referred to it in his presentation as a way to create “ambient intimacy”. Throughout the two days there were many mentions of the need to be authentic while tweeting, with warnings given to those who attempted to Tweet in a disingenuous way for the purpose of selling things or self-promotion—yet there were also discussions about the fun of Tweeting as a made-up character and using the medium to create a rich fictional universe.
So what does it really mean to “get” Twitter? I think it’s simple—getting Twitter isn’t about using it in a specific “right” way. Getting Twitter means being aware of being a part of a large, interconnected flow made up of millions of smaller conversational streams. The garnering of this awareness is the real power of Twitter. It has the effect of doing away with the dualistic, either/or thinking that most of the world still runs on and expanding it to an either AND or. This is to say that while there are proven best practices about how to make the most of your Twitter experience, there’s also an inbuilt flexibility to the application that can’t be whittled down to a single set of rules or facts about how to use the service. The awareness of this flexibility can translate into real life lessons as well. In a world fixated on results and returns, Twitter is a reminder to stay loose, open and free in your thinking.
Instead of thinking of it as either/or I think of Twitter as being simultaneously a means for disruption and engagement. It’s a tool for amplifying valuable information and a squawk box of incessant inanities. It’s a platform for being “real” by discovering that there isn’t a single “real” you: Twitter teaches us that we are all a million different people from one day to the next, just like in that Verve song, “Bittersweet Symphony”. In fact, we’re a million different people from one tweet to the next—there’s the business me and the personal me, the relaxing, goofy me and the serious, impassioned debater. There’s no need to whittle these selves down on Twitter just like there’s no need to whittle them down in real life—what is needed, however, is the awareness that this multiplicity is the case, as being aware will allow for better implementation of the crowd of characters in each one of us.
This awareness should extend to the management of the various streams we each dip in and out of all day long. There is certainly a value to using tools such as Tweetdeck and the new and improved Peoplebrowsr to keep track of trends and people that are important to us, but I would argue that getting too wrapped up in mining Twitter for “meaningful” data will eventually result in losing the awareness of the Twitter flow that connects everyone and everything. A looser approach to Twitter will allow for the kinds of happy accidents and discoveries that enables one to move beyond their current sphere of influence. Twitter is about expanding your connections—not limiting them. It’s about sometimes going “off script” and embracing the mistakes that are often the result of powerful passions. As its creator Jack Dorsey said on Tuesday at the conference, “Expect the unexpected, and whenever possible BE the unexpected.”
Special thanks to Jeff Pulver for inviting me to be a part of this spectacular spectacular!
(posted with tweetshots.com)
This is a Tweet from @btl my MC alter-ego on Twitter. I actually told Jack Dorsey, inventor of Twitter, that when I first found out about Twitter I had the idea of putting out an anonymous poetry feed into the ether. While it turned out that I became a character instead, I still enjoy busting out the occasional rhyme on @btl
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
“Jolene” (Divide and Kreate Remix)—Dolly Parton
I watched Morely Safer interview Dolly Parton on 60 minutes last night and I was pretty wowed out by her. Morely noted to the audience that she was as real as they come, and he ought to know since he’s been doing interviews on the show since before my parents even met. I knew she had a tuff life but I didn’t know she was dirt poor—one of 14 kids growing up in a shack in Tennessee without electricity or running water. I was shocked by a story she unabashedly told of being a little girl and so enamored by the pigs on the family farm that one day, her parents found her squeezed in between the pigletts, nuzzling on the mama pig’s teet!!!
She always knew she wanted to be a singer and left for Nashville on the day after her high school graduation. She created her attention-grabbing look based on the town tramp and wears her trademark ginormous bleached hair and heavy make-up to this day. She described herself in the interview as a cartoon character that she created. She said that she was three people—Dolly the business woman, Dolly Parton the singer and entertainer, and the Dolly that her family and friends knew.
I relate to her self-awareness about being a character. There’s a big difference, however, to being a character online and a character onstage. I was a clown in the chorus of Barnum during my freshman year of high school and thought it was all great fun until I stepped out in the bright lights and saw a black abyss in front of the stage where I’d expected to see the smiling, happily expectant faces of the audience… After that it was purely behind the scenes for me. I can strip things down to the bone for hundreds and thousands in my posts but I can’t imagine doing it LIVE with all of those people really THERE.
It’s one thing to fake it so real and flip the laptop lid shut and another to dive into a sea of people, half-naked but still in character…
There’s a thereness to the real world that hasn’t (yet) been duplicated. I am of the mindset that this is a good thing, as I don’t think the aim of technology should be to recreate the existing “real” world, but to invent new ways of being that are (loosely) based upon it.
P.S. I got this disco mix of Jolene off of a Tumblr mix by Sufjan Steven called “The Mix Will Rise Again” filled with tunes from and inspired by the past.
I’m really excited to be a part of a conference being billed as “the Davos of Twitter”. It will be a chance for me to discuss the ideas I’m exploring on this site with some of the biggest names in social media. Jeff Pulver is very cool to throw a renegade philosopher internet mash-up thinker like me into the mix.
The idea of a conference being made up of a cast of people playing (in whatever way they decide) a version of the character they are on Twitter is very intriguing to an unrepentant internet charlatan such as myself. Twitter is an example of how we constantly create selves—approaching everything we do not as a single “true” self but as a multiplicity—a crowded crew of eclectic possibilities for interaction with others and the world.
Living one’s life in social media garners an awareness for this multiplicity. The act of logging in and going online makes us more aware of the character we’re invoking—whereas in the “real world” our personality shifts might seem more seamless. Instead of trying to winnow down the selves to one, I want to explore how social media can help us engage as multiplicities—how we can communicate in forms of many-to-many—as networks and streams and ever-mutating organic groups.
“The purest art is the most useless. In today’s world nothing typifies this better than blogs. Graffiti is also a good example, especially if it’s illegal and is painted over the very next day.”
—TRUEBOY, one of my three fictional alter-egos on BTB, circa 2006
A Giant Robot t-shirt is about to get mixed with one of the flygrrrls. What will your T-shirt look like? Order now and let me create an original design based on yr Twitter feed.
I can imagine putting this stencil flush against the collar—the perfect T-shirt to wear as an accessory to your fly new bandana.
