I ran across this odd widget the other day (via Rocketboom), and I had to share:

OnePlusYou Quizzes and Widgets

What makes this fun little web button even more interesting is that it comes from a free online dating website called One Plus You. I don’t know if they’re making some subtle comment on the modern romantic experience, but this San Franciso-based start-up nonetheless has adopted an interesting marketing strategy: humorous widgetry.

Normally, I would find this stuff a little tedious. The infamous ironic sensibilities of my generation, deconstructed to no end in academia and beyond, has left me with an untold number of psychological scars. But lately, under the intellectual framework of “Vernacular Creativity” (Jean Burgess), I’ve had to quell my initial sense of distrust and look a little deeper.

It’s possible that these widgets and other webpage add-ons, now hugely popular on social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, etc., are indeed expressions of cultural creativity. They might actually represent a uniquely democratic form of digital creativity, as seen through the filter of pop technology and pop media.

Right now, I’m still researching this phenomenon. My sense is that these small, coded visual forms (entirely free, mind you) are frequently created and distributed through an unmediated process separate from traditional systems of media control. The tools for producing widgets of this kind, like most new media, are readily accessible by average, everyday people. Thus, the mainstream and marginal are on a more level playing ground. Marketing and design departments of major corporations around the world share, essentially, the same cultural leverage as a kid in his garage with Photoshop and an FTP client.

One concern I have, however, is the process of cultural mimicry. To what extent do/will these webpage bells-and-whistles serve mainstream values and reinstate traditional hierarchies of power? If the creation of online widgets merely copies old advertising techniques–ie, misrepresentation or manipulation for financial gain–then the creativity of visual artifacts on the internet is somewhat less ‘vernacular’. Basically, it’d be a new form with an old function.

Questions:

Is there a ‘third space’ of widget-making?
What would radical widgetry look like?