March 22, 2007

Say It Isn’t So: No, It’s NoSo

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noso.gifWhether it’s the ultimate reaction to Web 2.0 or a hypocritical, post-modern, flash mob-inspired game penned as art, NoSo is yet another trendy, techy art project. But this doesn’t mean that it isn’t intriguing, fun, and hopelessly ironic in true hipster form. NoSo is a response to the ubiquity of online social networking produced by Christina Ray of Glowlab. It’s about the ironies of connecting on the social web and the way there isn’t always much social in this web. According to official project language, “NOSO offers a moment of relief to the technology wearied.” But, ironically, being predominantly a web-based project, it is still tech-centric.

Last Friday marked the project’s opening event at Southern Exposure gallery in San Francisco at which there were a few ground rules: “no networking, no texting, no cellphone use, no laptop use, no downloading, no blogging, no vlogging…etc.” Yet the project is about networking. You can set up a user profile on the NoSo site where you get to choose an online ID and trendy silhouette reminiscent of those made popular by Apple’s iPod ads to represent your online personality. To complete your NoSo profile, the site provides prompts like “Where I do NOt live” and “NOt my favorite music.”

Only one portion of the project actually takes place in cyberspace. The part that is concretely grounded on real turf sounds a lot like flash mobs (maybe flash NObs?). The NoSo site publishes information about the time and location of said anti-socializing meet-ups, which consist of a few people walking into a pre-determined location such as a cafe or park, snapping a few photos on a digital camera, then uploading them to flickr tagged as “nosoproject.” If this isn’t an act of participating in the social web, I don’t know what is. But at least the project makes us think about what it means to live in this age of ubiquitous internet technology.

—Rose Miller

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

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So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

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