#osnaa

[eliotjones]

@facebookcull - 2012

A twitter handle which retweets twitter users tweets about culling their ‘facebook friends’, illustrates the ubiquity of the ‘facebook cull’ in modern language. Not only this but the type of language used signifies its status as a modern pastime or key activity in a healthy lifestyle, a necessary activity for the 21st century human.

[eliotjones]

other social networks are available : the cull

Define: Facebook Cull (v)

To remove inferior and useless friends from one’s Facebook friends list. Typically fake friends, or those who one doesn’t want stalking them are removed.

Define: Facebook Friend (n)

Individuals who have mutually agreed to be ‘Facebook friends’, allowing you to view information on their profile, follow each other’s postings, post on each other’s wall, etc. Either party can request to be a friend, but the other party must accept the request.

The phenomenon of the facebook cull, is now part of a modern lexicon of language, a product of the way in which online social networks preserve relationships that would have otherwise unconsciously disappeared because of distance or neglect. The online social network presents us with brand new choices, the choice to befriend, to preserve, or to unfriend. It is this element of new choice that is the root of a new social etiquette; the ‘facebook friendship’

‘the cull” by artists Eliot Jones and Samuel Dillon presents several visualisations of online social space generated entirely by data obtained from the online platform, Facebook. Using Dillon’s social network as a data set; compiling and categorising information that was publicly shared by his ‘facebook friends’, this series of works explore the changing physicality of a social network through the categorisation and documentation of an online action; a facebook cull.

Culled - Giclée on canvas 129 x 200 cm, 129 x 200 cm (2012) 

Comprised of two visualisations of Dillon’s facebook network, before and after completing his own ‘facebook cull’. The images exist as an abstraction of information shared online. Created using an algorithm to generate a patchwork of colour gradients, where each individual gradient represents a ‘facebook friend’ from Dillon’s Facebook network, it’s visual attributes defined by the information they share and do not share online. It is an portrait of digital space and the peculiar online existence of its ‘dwellers’.