About

Context, intention and challenges

The project MyMiniMaxiLoveLife is part of the debate provoked by the advent of social networks sites and new forms of computer-assisted socialization. MyMinimaxiLoveLife focuses on the phenomenon of indexation and the widespread quantification of human behaviour on social platforms.

On Facebook for example, our publications, facts and actions are published but also processed, stored, sorted, indexed and recorded. The frequency and time when we post, the apps consulted, the comments we share, like or post, the words we use frequently, are all analysed by the algorithms of social networks sites that are governing, at the backend, the design and staging of the program.

By keeping records of our digital lives, social network sites offer unprecedented opportunities for cataloguing human species, of which the raw material can be computed and commercialized to fit in one’s wishes using behavioural parameters related to taste, interest, passion and desire.

Should we consider these phenomena of indexing and quantifying digital lives as a threat or a dysfunction, belonging to the liberal societies, opening the door to an Orwellian future? This is the red thread running throughout MyMiniMaxiLoveLife.

The Media are far from neutral. They all have their own specific features. While the purpose remains unchanged – that is to inform, communicate and entertain – the conditions in which the contents are released and relayed, changes and this depend on the medium, but also on infrastructure and logistics.

The  artistic as well as technical issue then comes down to having an acute knowledge of these changes to be able to question the resources of the media, both on the level of the media as medium, as on the level of the perceptions, experiences and the narrative formats that they are associated with: what is the impact of a media such as Facebook with its interaction modes and well-typed aesthetic code on the circulation of information? How do the new forms of socialization of Facebook, for example, transform the way we inform, communicate and entertain?