FREEDOM

New York Times contributor Peggy Orenstein tackles the theme of self-control within the context and relation of the internet. This article explores such ideas and questions such as the usefulness of the internet and its content, and the state of the individual human mind. "Freedom" a program developed by Fred Stutzman is an application available for Macs and is gaining both popularity and notoriety. What does it do? Well, the it lets you, the owner of the computer, block internet access for set periods of time. This brings to mind many questions about our current society, the most obvious probably being...what kind of pathetic state are we in if we have such a lack of self-control over the time we spend online that we must seek Freedom? Hmm...

a link to the article

and to the application "Freedom"

full blown

The more I notice society's need to be plugged in all the time, the more I get freaked out. Ok, so it's kind of fun to see new notifications on the facebook, but the more I noticed how much and how long the average person is connected to the web and these social networking sites it made me become really interested in the psychological and health issues that develop from internet use. We Live in Public made really wanna tackle the idea in this blog. If your not by your laptop, you have your blackberry/iphone, and if that's dead or in the other room, well there is always the itouch in your coat pocket. You would never be crazy enough to think of it as a serious addiction, would you?

Who needs human contact!?

Best,

Kylie

Internet Addiction Left My Brother Homeless | Newsweek Life | Newsweek.com

Open or Closed?

At the screening of We Live In Public I attended last month, director Ondi Timoner explained that the film was ultimately about the loss of intimacy in the internet age. This informed her choice to open the film with footage of Josh Harris saying goodbye to his dying mother via video, refusing to be there in person. This question of connection, intimacy and openness is brought up again and again in conversations I have about the internet and its affects on social relations. Here are two opposing opinions concerning the notion of openness concerning web-based social interactions. The first from "the Elvis of cultural theory," Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, and the second from cognitive scientist and ethnographer Stefana Broadbent.

"[With the internet], all information from texts to music to video will be instantly available on my interface. However, the obverse of this suspension of the distance which separates me from a faraway foreigner is that, due to the gradual disappearance of contact with 'real' bodily others, a neighbor will no longer be a neighbor, since he or she will be progressively replaced by a screen specter; general availability will induce unbearable claustrophobia; excess of choice will be experienced as the impossibility to choose; universal direct participatory community will exclude all the more forcefully those who are prevented from participating in it. The vision of cyberspace opening up a future of unending possibilities of limitless change, of new multiple sex organs, and so on, conceals its exact opposite: an unheard-of imposition of radical closure."

-Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, 1997

Welcome. Now let's talk.

How much time do you spend on the Internet? How much of your attention is consumed by a glowing rectangular screen? Has the increased access to the Internet enriched your life or served as a distraction from it?

Ondi Timoner's film We Live In Public, winner of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival award for best documentary, grapples with these questions and many more through charting the rise and fall of late nineties Internet mogul Josh Harris. He had a vision of a self-surveilling society where human connection was mediated by technology, where we willing put our most private selves on display for a short-lived sense of intimacy or fame, and physically enacted this vision through the projects Quiet and We Live in Public. Inspired by the issues presented in this film, we created Offline Emoticon as an attempt to look more closely and critically at the total integration of Internet and Life. Our ultimate goal is to create a dialogue about our own digital well-being and to encourage self-reflective thought about what role this new, limitless landscape plays in our lives.

The choice of starting this conversation through a blog was an intentional one, intending to highlight the amazing possibilities for thoughtful communication that exist through the Internet. But we are seeking much more than irony, and our future posts will be interviews, photos, and responses to texts that we feel are relevant to these issues. Furthermore, as three young artists, we are interested in the creative potential of the Internet and how its existence influences our understanding of aesthetics and our personal art-making practices.

Now that we are in the specific cultural moment that Josh Harris predicted at the dawn of the new millennium, where do we go from here? The choices rest in our hands.

Cheers,

Rhonda, Sarah and Kylie