Notes on Nova: Facebook, the Town Square

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Facebook, the Town Square

Facebook fascinates me. It reminds me of being in school, or a small village where you know or recognize almost everyone.You overhear conversations or notice goings-on with the people around you, whether you are close to them or not. You see their flyers on the bulletin boards, announcements in the local paper.

Yeah yeah yeah privacy, surveillance, and all that. Just remember not to publish your sensitive info just like you'd shred documents with your social security, birthdate, and account numbers on them. Hell, my identity was stolen off tax forms that went missing from the US mail.

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Performing Persona: Social Networks as Medium

About this project:

"The Nova Avon"

This project uses internet social networks as its medium. Character-based, I perform this project as personae who post writing, photographs, and videos on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Blogspot. The characters interact with each other and the public.

"The Nova Avon" is an ongoing, real-time interactive performance occurring upon the platform of social media.

One of my objectives in this project is to use narratives of fictional characters to examine and deconstruct online social networks. Through writing, photography, and video, I create and enact online identities for these characters. Using the time, text, and image format of social media, this project is a blend of cinema, literature, and street theater in the public arena of the internet.

The main character is Nova Avon, a mid-level marketing manager whose story begins in 2009, when she moves from a small American city to San Francisco for a great new job, but loses it in the recession. A theme of this project is transition; the setting is here and now: Nova is dealing with our economy
and culture. Another theme -and the medium of this project -is how persona is performed users of digital media.

The project currently exists as a framework on this blog and the many social network sites for the characters; I am working to build and expand it in the following ways:
-further develop characters and content
-do outreach to increase audience viewing, participation, and interaction (including audience creating their own characters)
-give live and online interactive presentations/screenings of the project
-create related print materials

The main character is Nova Avon: a mid-career, mid-level marketing manager who moves to San Francisco in 2009 for a great new job, but the recession hits and she gets laid off. She meets various people and starts a consulting business. Coming from a small American city, Nova's vision of the world is constantly being expanded by the variety of people she meets in the Bay Area.
This project is comprised of social media pages written in the voices of the protagonist and other characters involved in her story. See Nova's Network below for links to their sites.
The story is told through photographs, writing, video, graphic art, and collage. I play most of the characters; some are portrayed by other artists. I write, photograph, edit, and publish the project. I use my cellphone to post entries while waiting for the bus, write from home or from work (during my breaks, of course). Some of the photography and video are done on the cellphone, whose wide-angle lens and low resolution facilitate wonderful in-camera special effects and illusions involving a puppet of the main character.

Please contact me if you would like to get involved. You can send an e-mail through this link or "like" me or "friend" one of my characters on Facebook (see "Nova's Network" below for links).

The Story So Far...

Current plot summary:

Nova comes to San Francisco, loses her new mid-level marketing job in the recession, spends lots of time looking for work and hanging out in the library. She finds a book she likes called "Haiku Cooking." She notices that the author has a cooking school in the area and contacts her for classes, and arranges to do some marketing work in trade for lessons. The director of the "cooking school" helps Nova to see that she has issues to work on. Nova meets more people through the cooking school, and goes to Germany with them for a convention.

Through Moslof Folsom, the president of the APNPA (American Palindromically Named Persons Association), she meets a new client named Burn Richards. Burn's friend, Norm Hamwick, encourages Nova to start her own company. She names her company "Super Nova Marketing" and gets business cards printed up.

Nova has started a new enterprise, "Silver Nova Computer Tutoring" to help people learn how to use the internet because she wants equal access for all.

Through her work in France at the Rising Sun Institute of Spiritual Cooking, Nova met interior designer Della Dantowski, an American with many European clients. Nova is in Holland now, doing marketing work for Ms. Dantowski.

How do time and persona relate to social media?

When we first meet people, we see how they are in the present. As we get to know them, a reverse chronology forms, moving from present to past, though not necessarily in order. To varying extents, we learn about other people in their lives, and events big and small. This happens with anyone we see periodically, whether they are friends, colleagues/peers, neighbors, or workers in businesses and institutions that we frequent. Most personal blogs, Twitter, and Facebook threads work in a similar manner upon first click, we see how they are now, If we scroll through past postings, we learn about people and events in their lives.
In August of 2009 I wanted to write a story using Twitter. I had a plot in mind and began to post bits of information that introduced this character named Nova Avon. I decided to create a persona who would exist in the social media universe; her character and story unfolding in real time just like most regular folks. The plot idea I had was an action-packed mystery involving a purse that Nova bought, and an object she discovered hidden in the purse, resulting in her being abducted and then using Twitter or Facebook to send out SOS messages that would lead to her rescue. But I soon realized that no one was really following her except a woman in Florida who did Twitter posts, “Tweets” about what she was eating, and then began to send personal messages to Nova, calling her “Frisco Gal,” and telling her how boring life was. (Her messages have disappeared from the Twitter site.) I became more interested in just creating a persona with a story arc like most people’s, flatter and without hair-raising episodes. I have always been more focused on character than plot, how a person is, rather than what events occur; the story of a person’s life is only part of who they are. How a person responds to the events in their life depends on how that person is at their core. And that core being can change over the course of a life, too. There is a continual ebb and flow between interior essence and exterior environment.
Nova Avon moved to San Francisco to take a great new job as a midlevel marketing manager. Just as she had settled into her Twin Peaks apartment and was beginning to establish herself at work, the recession hit, and she lost her job. She began to spend time at the public library, where she found a book of cooking haikus. She noticed that the author had a cooking school nearby, and enrolled in a class. It was not the kind of cooking class she had expected. Taught by Bernie Shakti, the class was about the relation between the colors of foods and the chakras. The class was at the Rising Sun Institute of Spiritual Cooking. Located in Marin County, it was directed by Suzie Baker. While Nova was not really connecting with the class, she did manage to acquire Suzie Baker as a marketing client. Through Ms. Baker, Nova met several other characters, including a video artist named Claire Bain. When Suzie Baker helped Nova realize that she had a drinking problem, Nova accepted a series of treatments in partial exchange for marketing work. Nova contracted Claire Bain to make a video about this experience, entitled “Egg Nova On.”

Quotes and Ideas

"We are continually becoming who we are by keeping our sense of self in flux."

-from Immediacy and Mediation: The Response of American Literature to the Emergence of New Visual Media, 1839-2000 (current project) Dr. Heike Schäfer, University of Mannheim, Germany

"Although in a way, and at a glance, the differences frame to frame were so extraordinarily slight that all twelve sheets might easily be one picture repeated, like mass visual litter that occupies a blink."

-From Mao II by Don DeLillo

Pages

Thursday, July 7, 2011

Facebook, the Town Square

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