Upon launching One Small Step: A MySpace Luv Story, a new browser window opens and fills the screen with bright, flashing, provocative, and twitchy one-inch square tiled boxes, refreshing with a new image every five seconds. The experience is nothing if not overwhelming, the viewer is bombarded with animated GIF after animated GIF, each one expressing some form of the lust, hatred, love or angst, so natural to the turbulent teenage social life. We shift suddenly from a vaguely familiar, mohawked pop-punk singer frozen in mid-scream as the words "I hate everything about you" blink next to him in a jagged font, to a flashing close-up of a cherry and the words "pop me." Before we can attempt to make sense of this juxtaposition, however, we are told in the next image to "hey, shut the fuck up" and accosted by the zombie-like girl from The Ring.

Anyone who has visited MySpace lately and clicked around has surely encountered many of these little "badges" which users post on their own profiles, or on others' through comments. They are used to grab attention, make a profile unique, and, ultimately, as a tool of self and social-classification. Each of the images displayed in One Small Step can be seen as a modular, reified emotion. The user can take their heartbreak and move it around their page, marking themselves - or, rather, their page as one of many facets of networked identity - with a physical sign of emotion. They can copy and paste their angst and loneliness. As with any of our other numerous tools of online social interaction, a MySpace page is but one tendril of our larger, multiple projected identity. We use it to interact within a specific environment, with specific people, for specific purposes, and we shape it accordingly. We do so through a process of self- and social-classification. I list my interests, you comment. One teen posts the "cutie with a bootie" badge, another professes love in the form of PHP. All this is a process of fitting ourselves into a number of socially defined classifications: I am a student, I am a fan of this band, I am in love, etc. This is done all the time in everyday life through clothes we wear, how we speak, where we hang-out and more; what makes MySpace and all of our 'Web 2.0' fanciness interesting is that it adds the social-classification aspect. Now we classify not only ourselves, but we let ourselves be classified by others to a degree not before present. As danah boyd has written, part of the point of interaction through MySpace for teens is to leave comments for each other, giving rise to a hierarchy of who leaves what for who. Did Shelly post that "bite me" badge on Tammy's page? Uh oh. It looks like Mike has a lot more friends than Sam. These are only some of the ways that classification has become increasingly social through these new media, and FlawedArt's One Small Step is beginning to touch upon the issues of spectacle and identity that work into it.

The piece draws from a database made up of these badges from MySpace, specifically ones dealing with these over-blown emotions. The fast pace of change from one image to another and the tiling try mimic the actions of these emotions among the teenage users. Rapidly shifting from lust to love, then to hatred and frustration, these images fill the screen as they no doubt fill the minds of the piece's subjects. They exist to grab attention, to make the tagged user stand out among many, to become a spectacle, yet it does so through these repeated and frequently re-used, copied images. Individuality through mildly modulated conformity. All this is very clearly communicated through the piece, and, while interesting, it is by no means a difficult conclusion to come to through a quick browse through a series of profiles. My criticism of this piece, though, lies in its misunderstanding of the users' interaction with these badges as modular, reified emotion.

The typical teen MySpace user who would post these badges does not interact with them in such a linear, monocular way. By essentially enlarging these small badges in the attempt to mimic the emotional impact of the expressed emotion, the artists have removed the key characteristics of these objects. These badges are important to the teens because they can be changed, moved, deleted, and combined with any amount of other data. FlawedArt's presentation of the objects makes the badges the center of spectacularity rather than the user, thus erases the interactivity that these badges imply within the context of a MySpace profile. It is significant that they are referred to as badges. Badges exist, one among many, on a piece of clothing to express a unit of information, changing meaning among different contexts, badges. When these items are endowed with a self- and social-classificatory trajectory, to make them into an overpowering force, as they are in One Small Step, fundamentally misreads their use and importance.

Overall, the FlawedArt piece is brave enough to approach this largely ignored territory for net art. MySpace and other arenas for creative social interaction have the potential to be fertile ground for the interaction between art, artist, and participant that so much net and electronic art has strove for in the past. Artists have only begun to take steps into this area, but as they do it is necessary to keep in mind the aspects that make these networks unique, what makes them operate.

[found thanks to networked_performance]