public | theDiagonal

“… But You Can Never Leave”. So goes one of the most memorable of lyrical phrases from The Eagles (Hotel California).

Of late, it seems that this state of affairs also applies to a vast collection of people on Facebook; many wish to leave but lack the social capital or wisdom or backbone to do so.

From the Washington Post:

Bad news, everyone. We’re trapped. We may well be stuck here for the rest of our lives. I hope you brought canned goods.

A dreary line of tagged pictures and status updates stretches before us from here to the tomb.

Like life, Facebook seems to get less exciting the longer we spend there. And now everyone hates Facebook, officially.

Last week, Pew reported that 94 percent of teenagers are on Facebook, but that they are miserable about it. Then again, when are teenagers anything else? Pew’s focus groups of teens complained about the drama, said Twitter felt more natural, said that it seemed like a lot of effort to keep up with everyone you’d ever met, found the cliques and competition for friends offputting –

All right, teenagers. You have a point. And it doesn’t get better.

The trouble with Facebook is that 94 percent of people are there. Anything with 94 Percent of People involved ceases to have a personality and becomes a kind of public utility. There’s no broad generalization you can make about people who use flush toilets. Sure, toilets are a little odd, and they become quickly ridiculous when you stare at them long enough, the way a word used too often falls apart into meaningless letters under scrutiny, but we don’t think of them as peculiar. Everyone’s got one. The only thing weirder than having one of those funny porcelain thrones in your home would be not having one.

Facebook is like that, and not just because we deposit the same sort of thing in both. It used to define a particular crowd. But it’s no longer the bastion of college students and high schoolers avoiding parental scrutiny. Mom’s there. Heck, Velveeta Cheesy Skillets are there.

It’s just another space in which all the daily drama of actual life plays out. All the interactions that used only to be annoying to the people in the room with you at the time are now played out indelibly in text and pictures that can be seen from great distances by anyone who wants to take an afternoon and stalk you. Oscar Wilde complained about married couples who flirted with each other, saying that it was like washing clean linen in public. Well, just look at the wall exchanges of You Know The Couple I Mean. “Nothing is more irritating than not being invited to a party you wouldn’t be seen dead at,” Bill Vaughan said. On Facebook, that’s magnified to parties in entirely different states.

Facebook has been doing its best to approximate our actual social experience — that creepy foray into chairs aside. But what it forgot was that our actual social experience leaves much to be desired. After spending time with Other People smiling politely at news of what their sonograms are doing, we often want to rush from the room screaming wordlessly and bang our heads into something.

Hell is other people, updating their statuses with news that Yay The Strange Growth Checked Out Just Fine.

This is the point where someone says, “Well, if it’s that annoying, why don’t you unsubscribe?”

But you can’t.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Facebook logo courtesy of Mirror / Facebook.

“Before I Die” is an interactive, public art project conceived by artist Candy Chang. The first installation was in New Orleans in February 2011, and has since grown to around 30 other cities across the United States, and 7 countries.

The premise is simple: install a blank billboard-sized chalkboard in a publicly accessible space, supply a bucket of chalk, write the prompt “Before I Die…” on the chalkboard, sit back and wait, watch people share their hopes and dreams.

So far the artist and her collaborators have noted over 25,000 responses. Of the responses, 15 percent want to travel to distant lands, 10 percent wish to reconnect with family and 1 percent want to write a book.

[div class=attrib]From the Washington Post:[end-div]

Before they die, the citizens of Washington, D.C., would like to achieve things both monumental and minuscule. They want to eat delicious food, travel the globe and — naturally — effect political change. They want to see the Earth from the Moon. They want to meet God.

They may have carried these aspirations in their hearts and heads their whole lives, but until a chalkboard sprang up at 14th and Q streets NW, they may have never verbalized them. On the construction barrier enveloping a crumbling old laundromat in the midst of its transformation into an upscale French bistro, the billboard-size chalkboard offers baskets of chalk and a prompt: “Before I die .?.?.”

The project was conceived by artist Candy Chang, a 2011 TED fellow who created the first “Before I Die” public art installation last February in a city that has contemplated its own mortality: New Orleans. On the side of an abandoned building, Chang erected the chalkboard to help residents “remember what is important to them,” she wrote on her Web site. She let the responses — funny, poignant, morbid — roll in. “Before I Die” migrated to other cities, and with the help of other artists who borrowed her template, it has recorded the bucket-list dreams of people in more than 30 locations. The District’s arrived in Logan Circle early Sunday morning.

Chang analyzes the responses on each wall; most involve travel, she says. But in a well-traveled city like Washington, many of the hopes on the board here address politics and power. Before they die, Washingtonians would like to “Liberate Palestine,” “Be a general (Hooah!),” “Be chief of staff,” “See a transgender president,” “[Have] access to reproductive health care without stigma.” Chang also notes that the D.C. wall is more international than others she’s seen, with responses in at least seven languages.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Crystal Hamling, 27, adds her thoughts to the “Before I Die…” art wall at 14th and Q streets NW. She wrote “Make people feel loved.” Courtesy of Katherine Frey / Washington Post.[end-div]