The Collective Me is a little project that keeps on giving. This one made me laugh today.
Revisiting Journal of the Collective Me
Being off for the summer, I’ve had much more time to aimlessly wander the Internet. I’m still addicted to Twitter (and still only engage in it through a browser), but I’ve also found myself cruising through Journal of the Collective Me much more often. This is a piece I produced last summer that essentially grabs tweets from the public timeline that contain the word “me” and posts them verbatim, in near real time.
The piece went live 11 months ago, and the site receives very few visits if any on most days, but I continue to find it fascinating. Like a zombie, I just sit and click though dozens at a time. I enjoy trying to place these random tweets into some kind of context. Who said this (sex, ago, location, career), and why did they say it? Sometimes it’s clear that the tweet is a joke or a music lyric, but other times there’s an unmistakable honesty in it. Plenty of sarcasm, teen angst, chest-thumping, too.
What’s been the most interesting development in the piece, however, is the how the “collective voice” has changed. There seems to have been a shift in who’s using Twitter since last summer. This is certainly to be expected; no social media user group is static. There is a much wider range of voices, and – most noticeably – there’s a big jump in the amount of profanity and explicit language being captured by The Collective Me. It wasn’t always like this, and it doesn’t bother me in the least personally, but it does give me pause.
I was fortunate enough to have The Collective Me exhibited at Fotofest in September and October of last year as part of the POKE! exhibition. The piece was displayed on a monitor in the public atrium space of the warehouse building housing Fotofest. Key words there being public space; there are many other companies, employees, and their clients using the same building and walking through the exhibition space. Back then, there was of course the occasional expletive or explicit tweet for all to see (and dismiss, if desired), but I honestly don’t know if I would feel comfortable placing the piece back into a public space as it is today, given how much more NSFW it has become.
That said, I still find The Collective Me very compelling, and the slideshow above contains some of my (cleaner) favorites from Saturday. Feel free to check it out yourself at www.thecollectiveme.com or follow highlights from the project on Twitter under the handle @thecollectiveme.
