The Social Network

On saturday night I watched the Social Network for the...ah I've lost count of how many times at this point. Still after seeing this film on more than one occasion it hasn't gotten old. Even though it sounds cliche and I think it was used in the advertisements, it truly defines the digital age and the world we are living in today. However it does not stop there. Thanks to the meticulous directing of David Fincher The Social Network is more than just a movie about facebook. It delves deep into interpersonal relationships and is not afraid of producing unlikeable characters. I think one of my favorite scenes throughout the entire film is when (SPOILER ALERT) Eduardo finds out that his share in the company has been reduced to next to nothing. The way in which the camera captures his anger and follows him throughout the entire scene makes the feeling so realistic. The dark and moody lighting used throughout The Social Network, characteristic of Fincher, gives the movie an edge and intensity that never disappears even in the deposition scenes where the rooms are lighter. This all being said it would be an understatement to say I am a little upset with the results of the Academy Awards last night. Having seen the Kings Speech I understand why it won, I just don't completely agree. Still, judging the two against one another is nearly impossible since they are such polar opposites. For example, one is quintessentially American while the other is British, one is about friendships forming while the other is about them falling apart and the eras they represent though both important are different in many ways.

Social Network Tilt Shift Sequence

So I watched the Social Network for the first time this weekend and I was really interested in this scene (the link to the clip is the title of the post). What struck me was the use of tilt-shift videography. It's a technique used to make the objects in the picture look miniature and not real. I didn't know that this could be used in video, I thought it was just photography. It gives the scene a really cool effect, almost as though what's going on in the scene isn't real.
Here are some more examples of tilt-shift photography. I think it's pretty cool.

Visualizing Social Networks via Facebook

I wanted to elaborate on some ways Facebook can be used to visualize social networks since my project will use Facebook's social network to generate content from users. An application on Facebook called the friend wheel visualizes contentions you may have amongst friends that you might not have realized.As you can see this application uses multiple colors to visualize the connections. Others have created visualizations of their friendship networks as seen below.
This visualization distinguishes the relationship we have with others into several categories. In figure 4 of Visualizing Social Networks by Freeman shows Moreno's visualization of friendship choices among fourth graders. Obviously, since 1934 the technology of data collection and storage has come a long way as Freeman mentions in section 6. The World Wide Web has in fact made creating and sharing visualizations of networks easier and faster. In terms of visualizing relationships, Facebook and other social networking sites have an advantage of using the profiles their users have generated to compile and visualize networks.

To change the world

That is a tall order, but it is related as with most everything to the power of numbers. Or if you wish to the empowerment of the user at either end of the link.

This is a very interesting "social network" concept that might have a big real life influence in a very positive way:

http://www.worldkey.org/html/index.html

Meta Markets

How will information gatherers and hunters survive in the digital age? Some signs are already apparent. As blogs matured they became a real force in the economy by consolidating opinions , analysis and gossip that sways, shapes and creates public opinion.

Witness Tila Tequila's (The Baddest Bitch in the Block) MySpace site where her profile has been seen a mere 123,875,022 times and you can see how clicks do turn into big bucks. Of course we have known that for a few years already although it has taken the entertainment industry quite a while to catch up, at that.

But there are more interesting things happening which are just (barely) outside of the mainstream and that I expect will become the next big thing (remember you saw it here first!).

Take a look at Meta-Markets for example. Their opening blurb says:

Meta-Markets is an online stock market for trading socially networked creative products such as YouTube videos, Delicious bookmarks, blogs, or social network profiles.
In NYSE or NASDAQ people trade shares of companies. In Meta-Markets people trade shares of bookmarks, profiles, videos, or blogs. Just like companies, socially networked products have ever growing values. When product owners issue their shares in Meta-Markets, they raise capital – today play capital, but tomorrow real capital. With Meta-Markets we aim to help people to retain the value of their immaterial labor in social web services.

Meta-Markets evolved from work done at the Physical Language Workshop in MIT as a research project in online economies and "sustainable life forms". Projects like OPENSTUDIO from PLW is another example of an emerging market community that allows artists, curators, buyers, dealers and viewers to create an economy that "breaks free of the shackles of the tired gallery/patron model representative of the classic schmism between the creative and the lucrative."

Even though today, as Meta-Markets says, you are dealing with "play-money", it will become tomorrow's real capital.

Tulum I, by Arturo Sinclair

And, hey! I just sold my first art work today for a whooping 2β Buraks!

Social Networks, the Ugly

We have talked about the problems of certain aspects of some social networks, and the degrading lifestyles some people can participate in as a resident of Second Life, but this social network JuicyCampus.com seems to have very little redeeming social value as a whole.

Is it a free speech issue, since that is at the forefront with the political campaigns, or should this site be made to shut down? I'm still on the fence on this one!

Doug