12 Ways To Have Fun With Facebook

Using the social networking site as an art project in which your "friends" are the medium is more benign than you'd think!

1. Wrestling the Algorithm

Sometimes I go on to Facebook just to wrestle with its newsfeed algorithm. I click on and like random things others have shared to change the algorithm's calculations about me.

2. Who Am I?

Then, when I start seeing things on Facebook that make no sense to me, I get to rediscover who I am, who I might be, who I could become.

3. Breaking the Mold...or Not!

It's not clear if the algorithm reflects our social interests or reshapes them. I'm not sure if the distinction really even matters anymore. That's the wonder and the power of behavioral feedback loops.

4. Advertising Myself

Facebook is careful to make its algorithm mysterious and difficult to manipulate strategically, just as Google protects its search algorithms from SEO-optimization gambits. Facebook would prefer users to pay to promote their posts to an audience whose scope is well-defined, much in the way conventional advertisers have long been accustomed to.

5. Consciousness Raising

Via dismagazine.com

Maybe it's less cynical to think of our interactions with the Facebook algorithm instead as an encounter with a sublime, overarching artwork. It can "transform the consciousness of the individual receiving it," as this essay claims all artworks ultimately aim to achieve.

6. The Medium Is the Message???

It's one thing to have the experience of being an artist, or even being an audience, but quite another sort of thrill to have the experience of being a medium — to have it dawn on you that your sociality is being steered to trace the contours of a vast social graph on which you are plotted. You can start to consume your own social life as a work fashioned by some inscrutable bot-artist, while in a sense being that work.

7. Enjoy the Buffet

My buffet of self-consumption on social media ideally distracts me from the way these networking sites let us work with social inclusivity as a medium and transform "belonging" into an alienated aesthetic response, a reified commodity.

8. Keep It Up

I start to worry sometimes that being silent on social media is more expressive than the rote efforts at polite acknowledgment that would likely be all I could manage if I really tried to keep up with everyone.

9. (I'm Picking Up) Good Vibrations

So I try to make an oblique game out of my social-media use that renders the irony of everything I share unstable. This seems like protection from seeming insincere, because what is so terrifying is not knowing in advance whether everyone on Facebook will recognize my good intentions!

10. Clearly Ambiguous

Oddly then, by making the networking substrate of social behavior so overt and explicit, Facebook also makes it opaque, ambiguous. I keep seeing more posts whose intentions I need to interpret, and I need to separate the intentions of the person who posted it from the intentions of Facebook and the intentions of the algorithm that decided to show it to me.

11. Huh?!

Half the time I don't even know what I mean by posting something! I have to wait to see how people respond.

12. Wheels Within Wheels

Somehow this "try whatever and then wait and see" approach seems more "authentic" than trying to be exceedingly careful and strategic with what I post. Sadly, I can't ever know if you really believe I'm not being all that strategic. :(