Jonathan Harris: Rethinking Social Networking | Big Think

Jonathan Harris: Rethinking Social Networking

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Artist Jonathan Harris describes four trends that are reshaping culture in the digital age: Compression, Disposability, Curation, and Self-Promotion, and takes steps to counteract them.

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JJonathan Harris:

onathan Harris makes projects that reimagine how humans relate to technology and to each other.

Combining elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling, his projects range from building the world’s largest time capsule (with Yahoo!) to documenting an Alaskan Eskimo whale hunt on the Arctic Ocean (with a warm hat).

He is the co-creator of We Feel Fine, which continuously measures the emotional temperature of the human world through large-scale blog analysis, and has made other projects about online dating, modern mythology, happiness, anonymity,news, and language. His latest project is Cowbird, a community of storytellers working to build a public library of human experience.

Jonathan studied photography (with Emmet Gowin) and computer science (with Brian Kernighan) at Princeton University, and went on to win a 2005 Fabrica fellowship and three Webby Awards. His work has also been recognized by AIGA, Ars Electronica, the state of Vermont (for which he co-designed the state quarter), Print Magazine (which named him a 2008New Visual Artist) and The World Economic Forum (which named him a 2009 Young Global Leader).

His work has been exhibited widely at MoMA (New York), Le Centre Pompidou (Paris), The Victoria & Albert Museum (London), The CAFA Art Museum (Beijing), the Garage Center for Contemporary Art (Moscow), and The Pace Gallery (New York), and has been featured on CNN, NPR, BBC, and Bhutanese television.

He has lectured all over the world, including at the TED Conference, Google, Princeton and Stanford Universities, and at least two hippy forest gatherings.

Starting on his 30th birthday, he documented his life for 440 days with one photo and short story a day.

Born in northern Vermont, he now lives in California, and on Cowbird.

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TRANSCRIPT:

I really see Twitter, and Facebook to a slightly lesser extent, but really Twitter as routing devices for human attention. They are very good at that. They’re effectively providing our species with a common nervous system, which we can use to transmit signals to each other. And so, when there's something that is a very provocative or disturbing signal or a very beautiful signal, it’s a great system to get a lot of humans’ attention directed at that thing very, very quickly, and that can actually happen in a matter of moments now or minutes.

I think as self-expressive mediums they’re less elegant, and I actually don't think they’re designed to be self-expressive mediums in the same way that a blank piece of paper and a pen is designed to be a self-expressive medium. And so, when I think about, like, Cowbird and how it relates to services like Twitter and Facebook, I really see Twitter and Facebook as routing devices that can route attention to experiences and Cowbird stories more as the experiences themselves.

I had noticed a few trends happening in online culture in general but also just in culture more generally over the last few years, and there were really four that sort of struck me as things that I wanted to transform and to reverse a little bit.

The first one is compression. One thing we’ve seen, actually predating the Web but accentuated with the Web, is the compressing and shortening and speeding up of communication. So you can go back to like letter writing, which gave way to eventually telephone calls, which then gave way to faxes, which then gave way to e-mails, which then gave way to text messages and chats and tweets. And each successive level gets like more and more compressed and shorter and faster, and we’re sort of like hovering at the tweet right now, and it was unclear to me that there's another level of compression after that. There maybe is one more, like maybe we start grunting at each other or something. But we’ve pretty much hit a kind of terminal velocity, I think, in terms of how fast communication can go.

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