Let me start this article by saying as a 50+ year old man, I have absolutely no reason to be on social networking, other than to make it uncool for all the young folk, or in a work environment, help create social marketing strategies for corporations.

There is no doubt Facebook is a great tool to help corporations sell products more effectively as it has brilliant data mining algorithms and it helps you target people with greater accuracy.

At its core, Facebook is nothing more than 24/7 advertising platform for a person or a product whereby one can extol the virtues of said person or product.

Also, besides it being a narcissist’s paradise and turning people into a never ending news cycle, it also gives voice to lowest common denominator opinions, with racist, sexist and bigoted fan-pages having a field day like never before.

As soon as a hot topic issue is heard about in the news, it is guaranteed to have its own Facebook page created within minutes, with the ‘lord of the flies’ set salivating over the chance to post their hatred for everyone to see.

So it comes as excellent news that the winner of this year’s “Telstra National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award” for the “Telstra Work on Paper Award” went to Raymond Zada for his brilliant work titled “Racebook”

“Racebook is a response to racist comments posted in two Facebook groups: ‘Aboriginal Spongebob’ and ‘Giving ya wife a sniff of ya petrol cos ur a top noonga’. The groups had more than 43,000 people liking them. The letters of Racebook are formed from actual comments posted in those two groups.

They give a snapshot of some people’s attitudes toward, and perceptions of, Aboriginal people in Australia. These sites included comments as disturbing as an individual stating he wanted to shoot Aboriginals. At the other extreme was a comment posted by someone who said, “im suprised racism stil exitsts.” [sic]

Racebook represents the artist’s purging of the hateful comments while raising awareness of the attitudes being expressed in social media.”

To see the work, click here.

Article by David Goldberg