Plant watered when it gets Facebook Fans
By Mark Brown |16 September 2010 |Categories: CulturePlant watered when it gets Facebook fans dies
Say hello to Meet Eater. It’s an Australian plant that was watered and fed in accordance with interaction on its Facebook page. Unluckily, Meet Eater has seen the effects of super stardom first hand, as the support from its giant fanbase over-watered the plant and killed it.
The plant, hooked up to a computer, was automatically watered when people became a fan of the Facebook page or wrote comments on its wall. Acts of kindness and adoring Meet Eater celebrity were turned into extra rations and squirts of delicious water.
Unfortunately, the delicate balance between malnourishment and over-watering just couldn’t be met, with the plant’s overwhelming support (courting over 6,600 fans and counting) leading it to a grim, watery demise. Twice, in fact, with the plant now being replaced by a third, more water resilient, species
It’s part of an interactive project at the University of Queensland in Australia, with creator Bashkim Isai describing the green-thumbed artistic experiment as “a desire to reestablish the connection between human beings and plants”. It extends into the physical too, with the plant hooked up to speakers so it can purr or splutter, when its happy or being overwhelmed.
(inspiring collective digital action to sustain living things)
As expected, interested parties need to send in several pieces of information about how they relate to that person before Twitter will take action. Once the proper credentials have been sent to the company (via e-mail or snail mail), Twitter is then able to do one of two things: either remove a deceased user's account entirely, or provide an archive of all that user's tweets so family members can access them offline.
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