My copy of Big Pulp Summer 2012 arrived while I was away, and what a treat it is. A very high standard of writing and production, and I’m delighted to be a contributor. So I’ll be a bit quiet for a while as I read on …
Or will I? I’ve been away, and meanwhile, my efforts on the writers’ website Authonomy haven’t done so badly. I’m keeping my work there until something better comes along …
Such as Linkedin. I’m improving my Linkedin profile because it allows me to promote my writing in a professional way, and it isn’t a social networking site, (or is it?). I’ll soon find out.
To misquote Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs joke “The worse I do, the more popular I get”, the more I social network, the more outside the social network I become. Leave it alone for two weeks, and my ranking improves. Eh? This is because I don’t pursue the dreaded consensus. My social networking potential is zero. I actively follow the path of most resistance. That’s how art works. And on a computer, dividing by zero can cause havoc. I wonder whether the algorithm that drives Facebook and Authonomy can cope. I think I know the answer – an emphatic NO.
It’s a feature of the algorithm that drives social networking, that it sweeps along the consensual Nielsen data A1 herd all sharing the same product aware aspirations. I don’t accept that a computer algorithm, a simple formula, should be allowed to form groups and polarise society in this way.
On a positive note, the social networking algorithm appears to be failing. There’s a decline in the take-up of Facebook, and I think I know why this is. There are many zero-rated people with no social networking potential out there. It would be perverse and against the consensus to say why I know this is so. Meanwhile I’m reading Big Pulp Summer 2012 and keeping quiet. But I will whisper BlackBerry. Whoops! Divide by zero error.
Filed under: art, Arts, Fiction Tagged: | art, big-pulp, BlackBerry, facebook, Fiction, nielsen, social-networking, Writing
