Julia Burns

Social Media is the defining symbol and proponent for the new Ideas Age and the Y-Generation. Within a very short span of time, it has dramatically transformed accepted models of traditional broadcast media and news coverage. Journalists depend on Twitter and Facebook accounts, blogs, and related social media sites, not only to disseminate the news, but to curate it.

Performed in 2009, only 6 months after Twitter had begun to become popular in Sydney Australia, I planted a public intervention in front of Channel 7 News to illustrate the shifting and personal nature of the new frontier of information and broadcasting.

I installed my 'living room', complete with couch, heater, ugg boots and coffee cup in front of Channel 7 News in Martin Place Sydney and posted updates about my personal life and topics I was interested in directly below the Channel 7 News feed of world events and the weather.

The movement and attention of the crowd in the video documentation of the intervention reflects the ebb and flow of the nature of followers on Twitter accounts. People would pass by disinterested, then large groups would grow as I became more 'popular'.

After the intervention, viewers also began to follow me digitally and to connect with me via Twitter. The nature of these new connections is enticing to a public of traditionally distrusting strangers. Unfortunately this utopian ideal is taking place under the most sophisticated and threatening form of global surveillance that human society has ever known.