“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”
- Oscar Wilde (author, aesthete)
“The map is not the territory”
- Alfred Korzybski (philosopher, founder of the science of general semantics)
“Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is not a pipe)”
- René Magritte (painter of The Treachery of Images – pictured above)
Somewhere in the ethereal nebula of words that are yet to be born is the term that fits into the center of this Venn diagram:
And that term is what I would use to describe the Human Facebook Default Avatar photo project:
Painting a real person in order to make them resemble the symbol for a person. It’s plastic surgery drawn out to its ultimate conclusion.
This project may be implying that one’s two-dimensional social networking persona and their real-life personality are about as similar as a map is to the territory it represents. That would lead to the question – how many of your online “friends” are people, and how many are simply representations of people? And to take it a step further – do our Facebook profiles lead us to become two-dimensional caricatures of our multi-faceted three-dimensional selves?
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }