They’ve been looking for you… 

This seemingly ignites a new concept for self-referencing post-postmodern advertising: Acknowledging that you are an advertisement, giving your ad campaign personification, and then assuming that lonely Facebook users will thus want to be connected to the campaign because what else is there to do in 2010 besides click a lot of ‘like’ buttons?

Wait why are you crying?

(via britefutures)

Using the wise jargon of tumblr user ohwelp, we’d like to introduce you to a temporary exhibit here at the Museum called “WELP and YIKES,” where we juxtapose two different but hilariously/unfortunately interrelated issues, one which is fairly silly and constitutes a “welp”, and one which is actually horrible and constitutes a major “yikessss!”  

So where are we going with this, you might ask?

Well we’re taking you to a very special place smack in the middle of the great state of New Jersey.  
Presenting… New Brunswick, home of the scholarfest that is RUTGERS UNIVERSITY.

First up, the WELP…
“Rutgers Launches New Civility Campaign to Help Make People from New Jersey Nicer”.

Read on (from HuffPo):

Rutgers University, the flagship university in a state known for ruthless mob bosses, petulant reality show stars and cutthroat drivers, is launching a two-year project to get people – at least those on campus – to behave better.

Students, faculty and other employees are encouraged to attend a series of lectures, presentations and discussions on civility that start Wednesday. Residents in the community won’t be turned away if there’s space.

Kathleen Hull, one of the school officials running the project, says Rutgers has some civility problems, but it’s no different from other schools. It’s as civil as the world around it, she says.

But Hull realizes that some New Jerseyans relish a “rough-and-tumble” reputation. “We could come up with a new slogan: ‘Project Civility: You got a problem with that?’” she said.

Student government President Yousef Saleh, a senior from Jersey City, said he sees some examples of people being civil – sharing umbrellas, for instance – but some problems, too.

“One person closes their book five seconds before the end of class, and then it’s like a waterfall, everybody closes their book,” he said. “It’s disrespectful to the professor.”

And don’t get him started on the nastiness than can infuse student government politics.

He doesn’t blame New Jersey.

“It’s because we’re college students and we’re paying for services and we all feel entitled to have a seat on a bus, we feel there should be short lines at takeout,” he said. “We’re paying the professor so we should be able to leave class whenever we feel like it.”

The project includes a series of lectures and programs, exploring such topics as how cell phones, iPods and other gadgets affect civility, and sportsmanship for athletes and fans.

The first session is a presentation by P.M. Forni, author of “Choosing Civility: The Twenty-Five Rules of Considerate Conduct” and founder of The Civility Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

Hull, who directs the university’s Byrne Seminars at its main campus in New Brunswick, said she’s not sure the project will change the campus environment.

Her hopes are relatively modest: Allowing students and university staff to speak openly about civility, maybe coming up with campuswide classroom policies on cell phones and text messaging, and possibly drafting some rules of conduct on the university’s fleet of buses, where students have been known to hog two seats while someone else is left standing.

But she said, students may not buy into the idea that they need to act better.

“For all I know,” Hull said, “there may be a rejection.”

-

Okay, so that seems kinda silly and pretty “welp”-y, but it’s ultimately good that they’re trying to get people at Rutgers to be nicer people.

How’s this initiative going?

Cue in the “YIKESSSS”.  Hopefully you know where this is going because you’re at least a somewhat informed human being and since this is all over national news, you’ve gotten wind of what’s happening.

But in case you haven’t heard about the Rutgers Freshman who committed suicide after his roommate and friend secretly made and posted videos of him hooking up with another guy, here’s the NY Times story:

It started with a Twitter message on Sept. 19: “Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.”

That night, the authorities say, the Rutgers University student who sent the message used a camera in his dormitory room to stream the roommate’s intimate encounter live on the Internet.

And three days later, the roommate who had been surreptitiously broadcast — Tyler Clementi, an 18-year-old freshman and an accomplished violinist — jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River in an apparent suicide.

The Sept. 22 death, details of which the authorities disclosed on Wednesday, was the latest by a young American that followed the online posting of hurtful material. The news came on the same day that Rutgers kicked off a two-year, campuswide project to teach the importance of civility, with special attention to the use and abuse of new technology.

Those who knew Mr. Clementi — on the Rutgers campus in Piscataway, N.J., at his North Jersey high school and in a community orchestra — were anguished by the circumstances surrounding his death, describing him as an intensely devoted musician who was sweet and shy.

“It’s really awful, especially in New York and in the 21st century,” said Arkady Leytush, artistic director of the Ridgewood Symphony Orchestra, where Mr. Clementi played since his freshman year in high school. “It’s so painful. He was very friendly and had very good potential.”

The Middlesex County prosecutor’s office said Mr. Clementi’s roommate, Dharun Ravi, 18, of Plainsboro, N.J., and another classmate, Molly Wei, 18, of Princeton Junction, N.J., had each been charged with two counts of invasion of privacy for using “the camera to view and transmit a live image” of Mr. Clementi. The most serious charges carry a maximum sentence of five years.

Mr. Ravi was charged with two additional counts of invasion of privacy for trying a similar live feed on the Internet on Sept. 21, the day before the suicide. A spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, James O’Neill, said the investigation was continuing, but he declined to “speculate on additional charges.”

Steven Goldstein, chairman of the gay rights group Garden State Equality, said Wednesday that he considered the death a hate crime. “We are sickened that anyone in our society, such as the students allegedly responsible for making the surreptitious video, might consider destroying others’ lives as a sport,” he said in a statement.

At the end of the inaugural event for the university’s “Project Civility” campaign on Wednesday, nearly 100 demonstrators gathered outside the student center, where the president spoke. They chanted, “Civility without safety — over our queer bodies!”

It is unclear what Mr. Clementi’s sexual orientation was; classmates say he mostly kept to himself. Danielle Birnbohm, a freshman who lived across the hall from him in Davidson Hall, said that when a counselor asked how many students had known Mr. Clementi, only 3 students out of 50 raised their hands.

But Mr. Clementi displayed a favorite quotation on his Facebook page, from the song “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again”: “What do you get when you kiss a guy? You get enough germs to catch pneumonia.”

And his roommate’s Twitter message makes plain that Mr. Ravi believed that Mr. Clementi was gay.

A later message from Mr. Ravi appeared to make reference to the second attempt to broadcast Mr. Clementi. “Anyone with iChat,” he wrote on Sept. 21, “I dare you to video chat me between the hours of 9:30 and 12. Yes, it’s happening again.”

Ms. Birnbohm said Mr. Ravi had said the initial broadcast was an accident — that he viewed the encounter after dialing his own computer from another room in the dorm. It was not immediately known how or when Mr. Clementi learned what his roommate had done. But Ms. Birnbohm said the episode quickly became the subject of gossip in the dormitory.

Mr. Clementi’s family issued a statement on Wednesday confirming the suicide and pledging cooperation with the criminal investigation. “Tyler was a fine young man, and a distinguished musician,” the statement read. “The family is heartbroken beyond words.”

The Star-Ledger of Newark reported that Mr. Clementi posted a note on his Facebook page the day of his death: “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.” Friends and strangers have turned the page into a memorial.

Witnesses told the police they saw a man jump off the bridge just before 9 p.m. on Sept. 22, said Paul J. Browne, the New York Police Department’s chief spokesman. Officers discovered a wallet there with Mr. Clementi’s identification, Mr. Browne said.

The police said Wednesday night that they had found the body of a young man in the Hudson north of the bridge and were trying to identify it.

Officials at Ridgewood High School, where Mr. Clementi graduated in June, last week alerted parents of current students that his family had reported him missing and encouraged students to take advantage of counseling at the school.

The timing of the news was almost uncanny, coinciding with the start of “Project Civility” at Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. Long in the planning, the campaign will involve panel discussions, lectures, workshops and other events to raise awareness about the importance of respect, compassion and courtesy in everyday interactions.

Events scheduled for this fall include a workshop for students and administrators on residential life on campus and a panel discussion titled “Uncivil Gadgets? Changing Technologies and Civil Behavior.”

Rutgers officials would not say whether the two suspects had been suspended. But in a statement late Wednesday, the university’s president, Richard L. McCormick, said, “If the charges are true, these actions gravely violate the university’s standards of decency and humanity.” At the kickoff event for the civility campaign, Mr. McCormick made an oblique reference to the case, saying, “It is more clear than ever that we need strongly to reassert our call for civility and responsibility for each other.”

Uh, yeah, about that last line…. way to tie in your new Make People Nicer program.

Cuz, uh, it’s clearly goddamn necessary.

The Museum apologized for bringing down your mood via teen suicide via gay issues via social media.  But unfortunately, that sounds a whole lot like 2010 to us.

…

Also, someday when it’s not “too soon”, the Museum would like to address the awkwardness that is declaring your imminent suicide on your Facebook status.

Art of Mod presents a new self-created meme made out of our new favorite Facebook sweetheart, Sierra Lynn, whose views on everything are brilliant and totally Fox Newsy chic.

See the previous day’s post on her views of ‘poisoning the institute of marriage’ for more good times.

P.S. Sierra, if you’re out there, the Museum would love to score some Q and A time with you.  Let us know if you’re down to chat.  Love, the Curators.

Busted on Facebook! [a manifesto for the mediocre]

When a married mom of two logged onto the social networking site, she stumbled upon the pictures of her husband’s storybook Disney World wedding - to another woman, according to the Daily Mail.

Lynn France had married John France on the Amalfi coast in Italy in 2005, and the couple were raising their two sons in Cleveland. But France, an occupational therapist, became worried that he was seeing another woman.

Her feelings of suspicion grew when John left his passport at home after telling her he was on a trip to China. Her next discovery was even more unsettling: John left a hotel website up on their computer screen just before leaving for yet another trip, so Lynn decided to check out the hotel with a friend.

“So I actually went there with a girlfriend, just to see for myself for sure,” Lynn told the Daily Mail. “He was there with this girlfriend. I said, ‘Hey, I’m his wife. We’ve got a baby.’ “

Amanda informed Lynn that she was engaged to John.

When Lynn’s friend recommended that she check out the woman on Facebook, she did - and found not just photos of the woman’s bridal shower but a Disney World wedding at which Amanda had dressed up like Sleeping Beauty and John as Prince Charming.

After the January, 2009 discovery, she began divorce proceedings. John France doesn’t deny that he married Amanda, but said he’s no bigamist. His first marriage to Lynn had been declared invalid due to a clerical error, according to Msnbc.com.

“This goes back years and years; it’s not new news,” John France told Matt Lauer on the Today show this week. “I hired an Italian attorney to go and confirm the marriage was illegal. The attorney came back with affidavits stating that it was invalid.”

France’s attorney, in a statement this week, indicated that his client will ask the courts to declare that his marriage to Lynn was “void since its inception.” The couple had signed a marriage license but that license was never filed, the attorney said.

“While it appears that John and Lynn France were both under the impression, once upon a time, that they were married, the fact of the matter is that their marriage was never legally proper,” the statement said. “And, therefore, it does not actually exist.”

In a cruel twist of fate, in addition to losing her husband, Lynn has also lost her sons - at least for now. John went back to his first wife in June 2009 and asked for a reconciliation, to which she agreed, she said.

“You want to give somebody a second chance,” she said.

But a few months ago, John took away their sons and left her, Lynn said. The boys are now with their dad and his new wife, Amanda, in Florida.

John France is attempting to get custody of his children, say his lawyers, and their mom hasn’t seen them - except when she sees the occasional picture on the same Facebook page where she found John’s Disney World wedding photos.

And the taken-so-horrifically-out-of-the-context-of-its-intended-meaning Quote of the Day goes to the lovely Sierra Lynn… “Stand up for what you know is right, even if you’re standing alone.” - Bob Marley would be proud.  Oh wait, I don’t think he would.

But seriously, has anyone ever considered building a special academy for the gays so no one has to look at them yet?  This sounds promising and profitable.  Maybe Sierra is on to something… oh wait, I think it’s called NYU.

Also, it’s great to see that 4 of Sierra’s Facebook friends went ahead and ‘liked’ her status.  Looks like stupid hippie bitch Megan was wrong, Sierra isn’t getting any shit for posting this at all.  Oh wait, I and the rest of the internet community is giving her shit right now.

In other news, I’m thinking of applying to the Institute of Marriage for Grad school.

(via scaeriel)

Facebook knows me so well.

Now if only they would suggest Artifacts of Modernity to all the fans of “Blaming Heidi Montag’s breast implants for all the recent earthquakes”.

The police blotter is just too violent and frightening to read sometimes… why must there be so much cruelty in the world?

(via catemcg123)

Early 2k’s middle-class American Mom Fashion and the Struggles of Social networking collide here.

While the main point of this shirt is most likely supposed to be the bedazzled Americana-colored FarmVille, we cannot help but conclude that the phrase “Online Farmer” written in a glimmering script font is really what makes this tank top so great.

“Online Farmer”.  Again, that’s “online farmer”.

What’s next, Online plumber?  Online highway cleanup?  Online sweatshop worker?

Online museum?

(via moosiemoose)

Mathematics of Social Networking and the Internets 101

Currently available for course credit from the Artifacts of Modernity Museum and probably coming soon to your local community college.