Web 2.0 T-Shirt Tells Us All Whether You Facebook Your Life Away [Apparel]
The latest addition to the chic geek's wardrobe has got to be this web 2.0 T-shirt. The classy bit of kit contains a list of 79 social networking sites, all followed by tick boxes. Tick the ones you belong to and wear.
Context & Ripple Effects
The tick-box tee extends a run of gadget-as-clothing that Gizmodo has tracked all year — October's Wi-Fi Detector Shirt made connectivity itself wearable, and this one makes network membership wearable instead. Its 79 pre-printed site names also echo the wall of Web 2.0 company logos Boing Boing posted back in February 2006, but inverted: where that collage celebrated the companies, this shirt asks the wearer to declare which services actually claim them.
First-order effects
- Wearers turn their social-network memberships into public, physical self-presentation — the profile moves from the screen to the chest, with Facebook among the 79 sites on offer.
- The shirt monetizes Web 2.0 brand proliferation directly: each newly launched network is potential inventory for the next print run.
Second-order effects
- Apparel vendors get a repeatable template after the Wi-Fi Detector Shirt proved geek-reference garments sell — expect status-by-tick-box designs to spread through the same chic-geek retail channel.
- Social networks gain incidental offline advertising every time a wearer ticks their box, a free distribution channel no marketing budget had to buy.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, network affiliation becomes part of personal styling the way band tees once signaled taste — identity increasingly performed through visible lists of services rather than single loyalties.
- A garment that needs 79 boxes implicitly documents how fragmented social-web identity already is by late 2007, foreshadowing pressure toward aggregation or consolidation among the networks themselves.
The trend: Computing culture is migrating onto everyday apparel, with wearables shifting from detecting technology around you to advertising your place inside it.