Oh, new Facebooks profile: when everybody’s creative… then everybody’s creative?

Just a quick thought on the new Facebook profile redesign. Oh, first: no one seems to hate it. That’s a nice surprise.  Very clever, them Facebooks: more pretty pictures, add a few more categories you’ve got to pay attention to at the top (e.g. hometown? workplace?) that tell advertisers a whole lot, add a few more categories that tell them even more (I’m a marathoner who loves the New York Football Giants! Sell me things!)… well done.

But the visual element of the thing seems to have caused more people in my network to actually care to update their profiles, moreso than any other redesign (and this is an actual design!) that I can remember. One (meaning me) might think “only so many of my favorite musicians are listed without a visitor having to ‘click for more,’ so who do I want to have above the fold!!” You know, more preening, essentially, that gives the illusion of productivity or even creativity as one puts on their best online outfit.

So it reminds me of one of my old old totally unoriginal original thoughts: what actually counts as creative, especially within closed systems? What I mean is like this: if you play with thisissand.com for a while and make a pretty damn cool picture within a very limited medium… who’s the “most” creative one here: the digital sand artist? the design studio that made the site? what of a person who actually goes out and makes real sand art pictures? what about hackers who bust shit up (e.g.): where are they placed relative to the people who use a system/medium to its originator’s intent?

Maybe this is only worthwhile when talking about these closed things that tend to pop up in tech-based areas. Or not: look at fashion. So this is not at all a new question, but whatever. To contrast, think of keyboard instruments or guitars or writing: you can never be the best in the world at any of those things, not even in a highly structured and codified genre like “classical guitar.” But in these more restricted media, I could easily master thisissand or Donkey Kong, or  like, read the OKCupid blog and put together a maximally effective online dating profile.

I guess I want to say that we’re all thinking and we’re all playing a bit more, and that can’t be bad, even if it may or may not be creative in the most stringent sense. In his TED talk on data visualization, David McCandless mentions how he, over years and years, just developed a design literacy so that when he started putting together infographs, he knew what to look for.

So I guess I’m not hating. I just think it’s funny. In an Economist year-end wrap up, Paola Antonelli predicts, essentially, that in 2036, design’s role and influence in society will be central and understood as non-frivolous. Perhaps a young population playing around within carefully designed platforms, as natural as breathing, is part of that movement.

I write in Avenir like Ernie wearing red cowboy boots: thoughts on the “I Write Like” site

Just a few quick thoughts on the “I Write Like” site that made the rounds on Facebook yesterday. For much of yesterday afternoon I saw individuals from some of my very different social circles post their results to the site on Facebook.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen anything like this go mini-viral on Facebook: we remember the huge 25 things notes and the various quizzes that told you which Sesame Street character or piece of footwear you are. But since then, those sorts of quizzes stopped for any number of reasons (fatigue, Facebook controlling quiz apps, etc.) It made me wonder why this specific site flared up and what it might mean.

To lay the groundwork: I wonder whether there is a connection between the Facebook privacy concerns of the last year and some possible fatigue for broadcasting everything about oneself. I understand that my social media experience only speaks for myself; I have heard that the microgeneration that is currently in HS has very different attitudes towards social media privacy than recent college grads, much less someone in his late 20s. Specifically, “Gen Z” is savvy enough to understand how to handle privacy matters but they have different concepts of what should and shouldn’t be private compared to folks in their early-mid 20s who were blindsided 2-4 years ago by the realization that everyone could see everything they did. Blah blah blah, the internet is growing up, etc etc.

All of which is to say, there doesn’t seem to be as much “here I am wrapped up in a neat package,” nor as much “here is my daily life” type online activity. Which brings us back to the “I write like” site and the sharing of its results.

Part of its appeal might be the sense of being “graded” by an objective party. Here is a site that allows you to cut and paste anything –  blog posts, emails, undergrad literary efforts – and it will compare that piece of text to that of someone you may admire (e.g. James Joyce). Even if you’re aware of the bullshit, if you take some pride in your written work, it does feel a bit nice to be told by a robot (which is certain to be objective!) that you write like David Foster Wallace (or, conversely, Dan Brown).

But why tell everyone on Facebook how you write when we’re all tired of reading about which musical chord or typeface represents you, and now nobody wants to contribute to that din? I say it’s because the website is not an evaluation of yourself: it takes something everyone on the internet does in decent amounts – write – and evaluates that product. Critically, it’s a step removed enough to say “I’m not being totally self-indulgent here!” but close enough to say “Well look at me, I write like Nabokov! Sorry, Facebook friend who writes like Stephen King!”

Point is, I don’t know if the desire to broadcast your personality went away; I wonder if it was just subdued by jokes about emo cutters who are still on Livejournal. But if a little engine promises to take something that actually is representative of yourself – your writing – and compares that to something we all relate to – well ooh, that sounds like harmless fun that’s just a touch intellectual, and doesn’t that make my Facebook profile look so interesting.

By the way, according to the site, this is written like DFW. (note I didn’t say it’s like something DFW would write)