SBOI: Towards an ethics of the message

By the banks of the Moskva Rechka, you take a seat on the steps beside a dusty bridge. Your friend Vadim has big news: he’s getting married! You turn and flash a thumbs up: “Like!” you say (or perhaps, “Love!” or, if you’re feeling especially expressive today, “Wow!”)…

This is what passes for “communication” these days.

The internet has unleashed the most profound revolution of human communications in history. We are more connected, closer, in a sense, then ever before; Yet as Sherry Turkle argues, “relentless connection leads to a new solitude. We turn to new technology to fill the void, but as technology ramps up, our emotional lives ramp down..”

There is a gulf between the forms of our online interactions and the way human relationships function in real life.

A system of perverse incentives governs how we connect with each other online. Technology — in its current form — seeks to reduce complex human connections to a banal set of common reactions.

These systems condition users. 
Users come to see their world as the system presents it to them: a matrix of likes, comments, and shares. 
Society takes these systems as a given: we assume, falsely, that this is simply how social networks must “work”.

We ask: Does it have to be this way?

Do qualities that we find repulsive in real life have to reign supreme online? Does the ability to listen — to be silent — have to render one invisible? Does the courage to share tales of struggle — to create intimacy — have to be suppressed (lest your online self be anything less than a chronicle of your life at its most flattering angles)? Does solitude have to be sacrificed in exchange for connectivity?

We are not a mass of silent profile pictures.
We will not accept a world where socializing is reduced to :) and stickers.

We seek to expose the absurdity and incongruence of the reigning systems of digital communications by translate online interactions into the offline world.

We seek an ethics of the message for the digital age: 
1. To generate discussion about values in digital communication 
2. To illuminate the gap between digital communication and face-to-face communication
3. To reject the reduction of human reactions

WE CREATE THE FORMS OF OUR COMMUNICATION; THEY SHOULD NOT CREATE US.