{"id":6842,"date":"2018-01-29T08:00:36","date_gmt":"2018-01-29T08:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.scraawl.com\/product\/?p=5957"},"modified":"2022-05-02T23:42:40","modified_gmt":"2022-05-02T23:42:40","slug":"marina-ulay-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/10.19.3.33\/product\/2018\/01\/29\/marina-ulay-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Perception vs. Reality: Finding the Truth Behind the Touching Reunion of Artists Marina &#038; Ulay"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]<em>Guest author Anu Hasan reflects on the impulse to share on social media and how a healthy dose of skepticism may be what we need to see the whole picture.<\/em><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In this day of instant gratification, nothing seems to give some people more pleasure than having people \u201clike\u201d their post or \u201cretweet\u201d their tweet. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">While there is nothing wrong\u00a0with these kinds of small pleasures, it does raise the question &#8211; where is this constant lust for attention taking us? And more importantly, are we being responsible in the way we undertake this quest?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I recently saw a rather disturbing picture shared by someone on my Facebook timeline warning parents about kidnappers being at large in Tamil Nadu, a state in Southern India. But it turns out that the pictures were not from Tamil Nadu at all.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It was odd;\u00a0no one questioned the veracity of the content. In their haste to\u00a0interact with important posts that get likes, people had jumped in\u00a0to share this post without checking if it was true.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There was one comment, somewhere in the babble of voices, that plaintively cried out that the Facebook post was wrong, but this lone voice was drowned out by righteous indignation and misdirected anger at non-existent kidnappers.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3>A Touching Reunion or\u00a0Fake News?<\/h3>\n<p>In another instance, a friend of mine recently shared a video \u2013 admittedly a rather moving one, of the reunion of the great performance artist Marina Abramov\u00edc and her ex-partner Ulay. This was during one of Abramov\u00edc&#8217;s sensational art projects in 2010 when Ms. Abramov\u00edc would share a minute of silence with a complete stranger. Unbeknownst to her, her ex-lover and partner comes and sits opposite her and what follows is a flood of tears, beautiful expressions, and hand holding.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">New York times covered\u00a0the whole encounter in\u00a0the\u00a0article below:<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"cms-video-container\"><iframe class=\"wp-embedded-content\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts\" security=\"restricted\" src=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/svc\/oembed\/html\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2010%2F05%2F31%2Farts%2Fdesign%2F31diva.html#?secret=MRN7uKdxIc\" data-secret=\"MRN7uKdxIc\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>But this was a video from 8 years ago.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I originally saw this video of the two artist on Facebook, and when I used <a href=\"http:\/\/scraawl.com\/product\">Scraawl<\/a>, I wanted to\u00a0run a report to see how the clip fared on Twitter- how many people had tweeted and retweeted since 2016 about this 2010 video. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In Twitter, I found that 138 users had shared the post. Not a large number but the report did direct me to the video itself on Youtube and I realized that this video now has 15 million plus views.<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"cms-video-container\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/OS0Tg0IjCp4?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<h3>Diving Deeper into the Social Media Data with\u00a0Scraawl<\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Using the search expression: \u201cMarina Abramovic e Ulay \u2013 MoMA 2010\u201d I went to Scraawl to collect past posts from September 1<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">st<\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, 2012 to October 19th on Twitter.<img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-5986\" src=\"\/product\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/Marina-Ulay-Preview-Search.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"354\" \/><\/span><\/p>\n<p>The preview search showed 3,000 tweets. What\u2019s useful here is that its popularity seemed to peak in 2013 which points to when the video went viral.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Going wider with a more general search, this time (Ulay AND Marina). (Luckily Ulay is enough of a unique name that it wouldn\u2019t be confused with any other person.) I found that there were over 32,000 tweets about the two artists.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-5985\" src=\"\/product\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/Marina-Ulay-Basic-Statistics.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"703\" height=\"361\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I collected these posts and saw that mentions of the two peaked in January 2013, a few months after the video of their encounter was put up in October 2013.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-5987\" src=\"\/product\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/Marina-Ulay-Timeline-View.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"194\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><em>Amazing!<\/em> I thought to myself and decided to find out what happened to this wonderful love story. And as I trawled through search engines, a rather sad if not unsurprising pattern emerged.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3>Beyond the Surface Level Reunion<\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Delving a bit more, I discovered that their last project together &#8211; the much talked about walk across the Great wall of China to meet in between to say goodbye \u2013 was fraught with tension. With elements of resentment and incidents of infidelity (both confessed and discovered), a slightly different and less romantic picture emerges. <a href=\"https:\/\/hyperallergic.com\/253160\/the-artist-is-pissed-ulay-sues-marina-abramovic\/\">Ulay was now suing Marina<\/a>. And the courts awarded him a 250,000 USD payout. The reason? It appears that Marina had not paid Ulay his share of the profits from the sale\/exhibition of their joint art projects despite having a contract.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Then I went into <em>Raw Data<\/em> within Scraawl and searched for the\u00a0exact phrase \u201cUlay sues Marina\u201d within the collected posts. Out of all the tweets, only 133 were about Ulay suing Marina and most peaked in November of 2015. There were perhaps more in other languages that I might have missed, but still a stark difference in numbers.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3>Navigating Social Media Informed<\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I went back to my friend\u2019s post on Facebook and noticed that since the last time I had been, <\/span><b>more <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">people had liked it &#8211; simply on the face of that video &#8211; something that captured a moment in isolation, blurring out the reality before and the bitterness after. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I wondered if I should break their hearts by telling them the truth but kindness prevailed. Unlike the previous disturbing post, this one only served to communicate that love could be beautiful. There really was no direct harm being done. A few oohs and aahs never hurt anyone. And so, I decided to enlighten said friend in a private message. Her rather blithe \u201coops\u201d served to reinforce my opinion of shared social media posts.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But I had to admit, you cannot change another person unless they were willing to change. I suppose the least I could do was to not join the band wagon of attention seekers and spread fake news.<\/span>[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Guest author Anu Hasan reflects on the impulse to share on social media and how a healthy dose of skepticism may be what we need to see the whole picture. In this day of instant gratification, nothing seems to give some people more pleasure than having people \u201clike\u201d their post or \u201cretweet\u201d their tweet. While [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":6012,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[87],"tags":[154,122,215,110],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/10.19.3.33\/product\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6842"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/10.19.3.33\/product\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/10.19.3.33\/product\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/10.19.3.33\/product\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/10.19.3.33\/product\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6842"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/10.19.3.33\/product\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11780,"href":"https:\/\/10.19.3.33\/product\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6842\/revisions\/11780"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/10.19.3.33\/product\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/10.19.3.33\/product\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/10.19.3.33\/product\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/10.19.3.33\/product\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}