Wider Reading | Small Business Saturday

Today is the first ever 'Small Business Saturday' - a social network campaign aimed at giving small business a share of the retail action that goes on between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which surround Thanksgiving in the US.

Sponsored by American Express, 10,000 businesses have been given $100 worth of free Facebook adverting. Also, for every person that 'likes' Small Business Saturday on Facebook, American Express will donate $1 to Girls Inc. - a non profit organization which encourages young women to become entrepreneurs.  The number of likes is currently up to 1,149,424 - but with the tab on American Express, you have no excuse but to get over there and give it the thumbs up.

Also, we are small business - so why not send us some flowers?

The Richardsons' Bathroom Wall, as notoriously curated by Grapeface

Those art lovin’ philanthropists The Richardsons' have very kindly donated their bathroom wall to the Silkworms Ink facebook page.

En-suite to our regular news bearing wall, it will serve as public art space. Like all gypsy-blooded things that don’t have legs, it often likes to change the scenery of its own little world, as such; it will hold mini exhibitions lasting only a week. A mini exhibition being three to five pieces of artowork that have a title and some cohesive idea behind them – so if you are a photographer, illustrator, painter, doodler, videographer, scuptor etc, and want to have your work up on display for the week then have a read of the submission guidelines below.

N.B We have made a bold choice in appointing Grapeface as curator. Loose-cannon, but if he had a nose, he would have a nose for art. So, we’ll see.


One last thing, just in case; please knock before you enter.


Submission Guidelines
Send submissions to submissions@silkwormsink.com
Send 3-5 images as e-mail attachment
Title e-mail ‘Richardsons' – ‘Your exhibition title’
Gallery space has a maximum width of 500 px. Height is infinite-ish.
Include your name, and if you wish a short biography.

Facebook | Chapbook | Vol XXIV, To the Last Mark

CLICK HERE TO READ

Vol XXIV, To the Last Mark

Joseph A. W. Quintela (14.8.10)

420 character prose poems. Employing social media and its constraints as his conciet, Joseph A. W. Quintela makes the most of the characters remaining. What remains is a damn good read.

Facebook | Wider Reading | Narratives

Facebook is already far too large to be described by a single narrative although The Social Network looks like it will certainly give it a good stab. Personally though, the story of a load of Harvard D-Bags getting rich through computer-geekery is not the story that I like to take away from facebook.

The thing that fascinates all of us about facebook is the fact that it is an on-going drama comprised of millions of sub-plots. Otherwise private existences which regularly spill out into the public domain in the time it takes to press ‘paste’.

Jobs are lost, relationships are ruined, hearts are broken and confidences are shaken daily on this internet phenomenon, yet it has the power to do such good as well. It means I can see what my best mate it up to in Brazil at the moment. It makes me feel less cut off from my old flatmate in Sweden. It gives me that warm fuzzy feeling when a red box pops up to say ‘Todd Swift likes your status’.

To this end, I have been doing a cursory trawl through the annuls of facebook anecdotes to bring you a selection, good and bad, of ways that this seemingly ephemeral cultural icon has changed lives.

1. Safety

“We had an incident at school in early August 2010 when a student came into my high school armed with a Samurai sword. This lead to the school going into a lock down which involved all staff locking classroom doors and hiding under desks. We used FaceBook to keep in touch with what was going on and we all collaborated what info we had to get a full story on what was going on. We were able to keep calm because of this.”

Source

2. Professionalism

“In October last year, Virgin Atlantic sacked 13 cabin crew after they branded passengers "chavs" and criticised the airline's safety standards on Facebook.

The company said the employees' behaviour was "totally inappropriate" and "brought the company into disrepute".

It is understood the messages were posted by members of a group created on Facebook, which has now been removed, about planes flying from Gatwick.

They alleged that the planes were full of cockroaches and that the airline's jet engines were replaced four times in one year.”

Source

3. Busted

Source

4. Vulnerable

“Have I experiences anything similar on the 'Book?
Let's get a shortlist of statuses that are depressing/annoying just from today.

-Takashi N- "Why is a woman so addictive?"


-Nick B- "Feels shitty"


-Evan B- "The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone."


-Brendan V- "Brendan V-/I'm unforgettable/Daisy dukes/Bikinis on top/Sunkissed skin/So hot/Will melt your popsicle/Ohh oh ohhh"


-Chelsea W- "irobot: nothing like a black man saving the world :)"


-Mika M- "will hopefully never regret anything"


-Alissa M- "365 days (heart graphic) i love you Jordan A- =)"


-Nick B- "My life is officially ruined :(" (Yes, same as the Nick B- near the top. He's only going into Junior year, so... yeah.)


-Sogol G- "I GOT A MAC!!!:)" (Sent from Facebook for BlackBerry)


-Taylor H- "Why do I end up alone at the penn center? Oh yeah. Cause it's pv"

-Chealsea W- "Really bored. Again."


-Erica V- "needs a name for her new itouch (her ipod was named Alfred). Suggestions?"


-Leah H- "did anyone else feel that?" (I will explain in a moment)


-Miles C- "Needs somebody"


-Dylan P- "just read a chapter of Hannity's book, and proceeded to LMAO"

I'm stopping right there to explain why I hate these statuses. The fall into one of categories:


-Whining about love life or life in general


-Stupid song lyrics


-Inane shit no one cares a bit about (the mac and itouch comments)


-Uninformed view on a classic novel (I, Robot sticks out. I don't think the protagonist in the book was a man at all.)


-Whining about boredom


-FUCKING EARTHQUAKES


-Ragging on a topic you don't agree with simply because you oppose it with no consideration

It's really sad. Facebook is a competition of "LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME". The ony time I post comments is general questioning (How many laps around the school track is a mile?)”

Source

5. Health

Source

6. Literary Debate

Source

7. Pro-Life / Pro-Choice Discussions

Source

8. Acquittal

“Pass the syrup -- this lucky guy is eating breakfast at home instead of on Rikers Island.

A Brooklyn teen's playful Facebook message to his pregnant girlfriend about pancakes sprung him from jail and helped him avoid years in prison for a holdup he didn't commit.

Prosecutors dropped a robbery charge against Rodney Bradford, 19, after learning his Facebook account status had been updated with the inside joke "WHERE MY IHOP?" from a computer in his dad's Harlem apartment one minute before an Oct. 17 stickup of two men in Brooklyn's Farragut Houses.”

Source

9. Family Reunion

Facebook reunites mother and long-lost son

Lori Haas says that when she recognized her son's photo on the website, 'her heart went crazy'

Linda Nguyen, Vancouver Sun

Published: Sunday, July 15, 2007

Lori Haas never thought the journey to find the baby boy she gave up in a closed adoption 20 years ago would end on Facebook.

The closed adoption meant all the relevant documents were sealed, and Haas spent a decade waiting to get her son's name through an active registry, where the names of birth parents and adopted children are revealed at both of their requests.

When she got the name but no other identifying information, the 37-year-old nurse tried Google searches to see if anything would come up. It wasn't until June 24 that a friend suggested she try typing her son's name into the popular social networking website.

Source

10. Sibling Rivalry

(click image to enlarge)

Source

Reading these stories it seems that we have gone one step further than Orwell’s vision… we are all Big Brother in one sense or another. Be afraid.

Facebook | Video | The Facebook Song

As we're talking about facebook this week... here is one of the gajillion parody songs on the subject. What's your favorite?

Facebook | Music | Cultural self-diagnosis, or, Dr Zuckerberg will see you now

Zuckerberg gets SO MUCH BEAN theze dayz...

Were the British Isles to be, I don’t know, sunk tomorrow (I would say ‘by North Korea,’ but I can’t help suspecting Kim Jong-il actually wants us around these days, purely to prove that his football team isn’t the very worst in the world) all that would remain of me would be my Facebook profile. At least, I assume that’s the case – I can only assume my Facebook profile is controlled/spied upon/vetted the other side of the pond, although to be honest with you, I have absolutely no idea what actually goes on at a Facebook HQ. Beyond the image of a Jewish fellow in flip-flops gangling around bellowing nasally about how he’s ‘redefining notions of privacy’ or something.

Basically, something of my Facebook profile would surely survive. Where all other records of my existence, be they familial, governmental, school or university-based or, indeed, on internet sites relying upon UK hardware, would be lost at sea. As would I myself, me myself, it can be assumed. Which begs the question, what would I then constitute? Who would I then be?

Eschewing for the moment quasi-philosophical notions of one’s internet avatar somehow preserving an existence within modernity far more consistent and comfortable than one has reason to hope for from their actual, pissing-and-shitting-and-sneezing existence etc. etc. etc. – not to mention sidestepping the frankly bizarre phenomenon of Facebook ‘tribute pages,’ dead people’s Facebook profiles that are preserved by their family in order to provide a kind of artificial graveside wall for people to continue to pay their respects to the deceased in texty misspellings and opaque acronyms – there is, I think, both an ever-growing self-defining tracklist and a comparable reading list on everybody’s Facebook profile that is rarely, if ever, thought of as a whole. And it is this, this above all, that I suspect might provide the most interesting basis for the Facebook reconstruction of a human being who no longer exists. The relationship between their reading and their music.

Because people who don’t read and don’t give a shit about music don’t, let’s face it, actually exist at all. In real life or on the internet.

I refer, of course, to the totality of what one has himself linked to, to what one’s friends have linked to on one’s own wall, and to what one has ‘liked’, referred to in statuses etc. etc. over a given time. Far more representative than what the person claims to be in the ‘claims I wish to make about myself’ profile-boxes (for various brilliant ways of dealing with an ‘about meee’ box, have a look at the LRB classified ads). For here is an account that factors in what you like, what you don’t like, what you want people to think you like, what your friends think you like, what your friends want you to like, what your friends wish to show the world that you do in fact like and so on – the whole multi-dimensional kaboodle. Here’s mine, since my little brother’s birthday last year (not that I picked the date because it’s my little brother’s birthday – it’s just where the ‘older posts’ Facebook button took me. What did I tell you, Zuckerberg controls us all…):

Tintin, Edward Lear, New Statesman, some pre-Copenhagen blog about environmentalism (back when environmentalism was cool and stuff), Eurovision, Stewart Lee, Adebishi Shank, Jonsi Boy Lilikoi, Lightning Bolt, Bunny Munro, Sir John Mortimer’s Summer’s Lease, Giles Coren’s letter to the Times’ subs, the Antlers, the late Jay Reatard, Bliar’s forthcoming memoir, Brad Neely’s masterpiece-take on the first Harry Potter film, Nancy Banks-Smith’s reviews, American Psycho, Edward Elgar, Ian McEwan being a bellend, China Mieville, Keston Sutherland’s Beckett lectures, To Rococo Rot, Eliot Smith, Nick Cave, Fellini and Germaine Greer having it off, Geoffrey Hill, the Fall, the writers behind the Daily Show, Marina Hyde, Le Grand Meaulnes, …the elegant prose of a homosexual, the National, Slaraffenland, Kraftwerk, La Blogotheque, Black Cab Sessions, Final Fantasy, Tanya Gold being an even bigger bellend, Hans Teeuwen, Stagger Lee, Penny Red, Melanie Philips (hahahahahahahaha), Bret Easton Ellis, Italian hip-hop, Laurie Anderson, Tom Jones feat. Janis Joplin (it really happened), the writers behind EastEnders, INXS, Salman Rushdie, Les Savy Fav, Mark Mordue, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Jeremy Clarkson As Author and Goebbels.

Three readings of my Facebook self:

I am a Belgian-colonialist Zionist Nazi-sympathising anti-Islamic Deutchophile who likes ultra-violent novels and unjustified swearing.

(Tintin+Melanie Philips+Goebbels/the sinisterly-titled Black Cab Sessions/Italian hip-hop+Hans Teeuwen/Bliar/Clarkson+Krafwerk/To Rococo Rot/Nick Cave+Easton Ellis+Giles Coren)

I am a silly middle-class pinko-commy Francophile Guardian-reader with a penchant for avante-garde nonsense, made-up words and bum sex.

(New Statesman/Copenhagen blog/Stewart Lee+Le Grand Meaulnes/La Blogotheque+Marina Hyde/Tanya Gold/Nancy Banks-Smith+Laurie Anderson/Keston Sutherland+ Adebishi Shank/Jonsi Boy Lilikoi+…the elegant prose of a homosexual)

I am the worst kind of student pseud.

(All of the above)

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Music Editor

Facebook | Fiction | Death To Facebook! Long Live the New Flesh!

“She knew several thousand people; in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously.”


My God, I love The Machine Stops. On-the-nose, some claim, but it’s deliciously so, I think. And besides, who can scoff at such straightforwardness when it hits the mark of the pitfalls of today’s modern society so often, and so much more accurately (I’d argue) than 1984 or Brave New World, its bigger, more famous cousins.

Like when Vashti turns off her “isolation switch”, and is assaulted on all sides by the voices of the people she “knows”, wanting to communicate with her,

“What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Had she any ideas lately? Might one tell her one’s own ideas?”

Hello, Facebook Chat.

If you don’t know E.M. Forster’s savagely anti-technological short story, it describes a world in which mankind has not so much been imprisoned by a totalitarian regime as imprisoned itself, through slovenliness, convenience and the desire to escape reality. All life is focused around the Machine, which is....just that, a great machine that stores information and enables communication between all members of society. In a quick burst of dark humour, the only book left in the world is an instruction manual for using the Machine, which is just beginning to become a sort of holy book in the minds of some.

Hello, Internet.
And if on-the-nose makes you cringe,

“We created the Machine to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it.”

If I’m being reduced to copying out passages verbatim instead of being rather more interesting in my discussion, well, it’s because I can’t fault Forster’s logic. The obvious link of carnality to pornography doesn’t intrigue me quite so much as the suggestion, elsewhere in the story, that physical contact with another human being has become abhorrent to us. I’ve met, myself, some young men of my age who have come to prefer the safety of pornography to the reality of sexual contact – to the risks of dealing outside the Machine. “Second-hand ideas” themselves become preferable to those experienced IRL. And that our sense of the spaces around us is lost – I couldn’t possibly disagree with that, having known, myself, the horrid, fuzzy feeling after breaking away from two many hours staring at the screen, as if reality itself has become unreal.
And, more worryingly, for our purposes, living outside the Machine becomes living outside society itself – becoming “homeless.” Damn straight. In order to preach this Luddite sermon about how the Internet is killing us, I, er, have to go onto the Internet and post it, and for people to agree or disagree they’ll have to do the same. And in order to write, I use my laptop, and in order to research, I use the Internet. I am becoming a slave, of sorts. I even feel a little guilty for typing this, because, hell, the damned thing is immensely useful, and it’s convenient. It seems inconsiderate to blame it because I’m too feeble to use it without it using me.
Or perhaps it’s wrong to call The Machine Stops Luddite. It doesn’t believe in the evil of technology so much as the frailty of humanity, when faced with great power. But it does have an enormous satisfaction to it when the Machine does finally come crumbling down. And I have to ask myself – if Facebook or the entire Internet itself collapsed today, for ever, I might be panicked, because I’d lose a great deal. I’ve stored a lot of photos there, a lot of memories. I’d be rendered pretty much blind, deaf and dumb. But I’m not sure I’d be saddened. I might even, in the end, be a little pleased.
That final exchange between Vashti and her son, as the Machine comes crashing down, all around them – perhaps one of my favourite dialogues in all of literature;

“Is there any hope, Kuno?”

“None for us.”

We are all children of the Machine now. We rely on it; we’re all tainted. But perhaps there is a way we can stop future generations from ever becoming addicted.

Jon Ware
Fiction Editor

Facebook | Introduction | More of an update really...

Week 12 | Facebook | Contents

Tuesday | Poetry | Banter

Wednesday | Fiction | Death To Facebook! Long Live The New Flesh! 

Thursday | Music | Cultural self-diagnosis, or, Dr Zuckerberg will see you now

Friday | Chapbook | To The Last Mark, by Joseph A. W. Quintela

This week we will mostly be thinking about facebook. A tribute to our brand spanking new facebook page.

CLICK HERE TO CHECK IT OUT


We have a couple of tricks up our sleeve here so we suggest you 'watch this space'. In the meantime, below are a couple of links to the best of FailBook.com

1 | 2 | 3

Editor-in-Beef
James Harringman