FACEBOOKING

Liz posted an interesting article from adbusters about Facebook.
I thought I'd share a project that one of my classes did last fall at Whitman, which we titled "Facebooking".

Here is a description of the project, and a link to watch some video documentation of the event.

http://www.benbloch.com/media_files/Facebooking/facebooking_js3.html

In this performance, students from my new genre arts class set up an 8' x 8' projection screen on the side of Penrose Library on the campus of Whitman College, where they projected a live voyeuristic websurf across parts of the popular social networking site, Facebook. Only their real-time voices could be herd over a PA system, as they were hiding around the corner in some bushes on a laptop computer using wireless. They commented casually and humorously on the pages as though they were in their dorm rooms at personal computers, except that anyone could see what they were looking at and talking about. We referred to the activity as a public Facebook sports-cast. The act of further publicizing an already public domain served as a clever and simple reminder that what is written and posted on such sites is much more public--and therefore sociologically fascinating--than users tend to assume.