Gallery: This Voyeuristic Site Will Make You Reconsider Social Media
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*Network Effect* is a new art project from artist-anthropologist Jonathan Harris. It might make you feel weird.
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*Network Effect* is incredibly voyeuristic. It's organized around actions like “ache,” “argue,” “bathe,” “eat,” and “jump.” Each theme leads to a full-screen viewing of splintered YouTube clips and layered voice overs.
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To make it, Harris culled 10,000 videos from the Internet. They used Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to target one-second clips of people performing actions that could be easily categorized. A custom string of code queries Google News and Twitter, to pull in Internet activity including those key action words. That's what fills the ticker running across the bottom of the screen.
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The site imposes a time limit on you, based on the average life expectancy in the region attached to your IP address. The message: get off your computer.
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The site includes untold layers of data, so you can leave the verb-based pages and attempt a deep dive on, say, the gender breakdown of people crying...
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...or news headlines about "destroying."
