who’s back in black?
SNS users are going black in protest of NZ copyright law changes. Twitter, Facebook, and Bebo user images are being replaced with black frames in a “blackout protest.” As I noted, only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, in my Twitter stream, this is preaching to the choir a bit (high volume internet users are certainly going to have an opinion on the guilt on accusation and ISP aspects of the amendments!).
But what I want to talk about here is not the protest itself, but rather the blackout. My Twitter and now my Facebook are both littered with black squares where avatars and icons used to be. And you know what? I’m finding that I have to work harder at separating out conversations with the black icons than when people each had different, unique visual identifiers of who they were.
With the avatars, I could, at a glance, know whose tweets or updates I was reading. The communicative history we shared was encapsulated in these images, an aide-de-memory as well as a visual representation of the person/personality behind the 140 characters.
As such, I think the blackout is helping to prove the importance of the visual in SNS communications, and the sociability of these exchanges. If the blackout were to persist, would the social ties of users suffer as they had to work harder, invest more time and effort, into managing their online ties. This is particularly true of Twitter, which is arguably an incredibly low-investment/high-return medium. Of course, we would adapt - but would the lack of visuality mean something was lost in the way we communicate?
So tell me - are you having trouble keeping who’s-who straight on your blackedout twitterstream? Or are you too busy playing twitter-crossword to care?
