Last fall, I attended a visual culture studies lecture at which the speaker compared the passage of information through modern social media to the Greek furies: an unstoppable, immaterial swarm-force. As a participant immersed within this loosely organized horde, each of us has unlimited potential to empower ourselves by acquiring and conveying an astounding amount of information, as well as entertainment. But many are less occupied with this potential than with our new pseudo Diary 2.0, placing all of the mundane musings, vain and searching selves, and guarded realities of the world laid open for the eyes of all. Artist Christopher Baker's social media-based installation work, currently on display at the Visual Studies Workshop and accompanied by a fascinating essay by guest curator Marni Shindelman, reflects upon both the trends in the current behavior of online humans, and exhibits some tools he's developed to navigate the sea of social media culture.

The first work the viewer encounters in room one of the gallery is "Murmer Study," a "live Twitter visualization and archive" in which a computer selects tweets containing the noncommittal yet universal words "argh," "meh," or "hmph" and feeds them through a row of 20 wall-mounted thermal printers ticking out long reams of messages. The mass of thoughts pooling on the floor might have been discarded to oblivion by the actual thinkers, but are immortalized online and within the encroaching mass on the bookstore's floor. Baker has touched on something crucial: the sheer volume of appearances of those specific nonsense thought-words conveys the current near-universal need to connect, or at least display, all of the time, about everything. Not everyone in the world is part of the online community, but so many who are seem to be privileged enough to have nothing to say.

Blame the attractive confessional aspect of the online environment - Twitter used to ask "What are you doing?" but has shifted to a rather more poignant "What is happening?", while Facebook prompts "What's on your mind?" - coupled with the fact that we spend so very much time online. But Baker's work also subtly points out that this new mode of human behavior exists because of the existence of the venue. Technology now leads human behavior, and has created a new class of it.

Gmail's superpower server boasts the end of discarding emails, enabling us to permanently digitally archive each and every online communication, presumably, for eternity. Baker's piece "My Map (Self-Portrait)" is a visualization of the artist's own social network created from 60,000 emails in his personal archive, spanning 1998-2010. The glossy print forms an image of connectivity: tiny names and tiny photos ring the exterior of a large hoop. Within the circle, glowing arced fibers connect the people to one another using email address fields of "to," "from," and "cc" as data to create "an open source family tree," says Shindelman. Thicker, brighter lines indicate a higher occurrence of connection; the whole resembles a globe wherein Baker manifests and puts to order a section of that invisible web which connects us all.

The constant access provided by mobile devices ensures that, in a sense, we're never truly alone anymore. But we've also seen a partial shift from direct human-to-human communication of phone calls, email, and Instant Messenger to message-in-a-bottle-esque status updates and tweets, while re-tweets and the transmitting of "memes" and viral videos are passed like batons in a cyber relay race.

The audio-visual element of online culture is captured in "Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise," the title a clever nod to Kubrick and the unstoppable nature of this beast. The info-card on the wall boasts that the work contains "thousands of unique video diaries gathered from the internet," with singers, hack lecturers, earnest conspiracy theorists, and all other sorts striving for an audience, but in this setting inundating the viewer with rows upon rows of images meeting at the corner of two walls. Speakers situated behind the viewer spew out a cacophony of sounds to accompany the images. The scene in the dark room reminded me of nostalgic-futuristic movies with an omniscient character enthroned in a room that glitters with surveillance videos. The overwhelming noise makes it hard to single out a particular monologue most times, and impossible to connect a voice with one of the videos.

Baker's work shows that our technology-given delusions of our uniqueness and importance, as well as our delusions of omniscient-access to the wide, strange entirety of it all, don't really pan out, but zooming out from the minutiae provides an account of a massive cultural shift. While we're captivated by the direction of the current technology is rapidly pulling us in, it's very possible to drown in the vast ocean of what is offered. We can't really contain it all or understand it at once, but by manifesting the virtual into physical form, Baker collects the finite and fleeting into a permanent documentation we can reflect upon and begin to understand.

A social-phenomena-savvy colleague of mine recently compared the current state of the internet to the Wild West; at present it's a fairly democratic, free-for-all scene (less so than in Napster's heyday), but we really can't expect this sort of strange freedom to last. The online wilderness is fading as we shift our lives deeper into the virtual realm and capitalism puts up the fences there, too. It will be interesting to see how those changes will dam the current tide.

Through May 23

Bookstore Gallery at Visual Studies Workshop, 31 Prince St.

442-8676, vsw.org

Thursdays 5-8 p.m., Friday-Sunday noon-5 p.m.