Graduation season is upon us, and with it comes the inevitable question: What are you going to do now?
If you have recently received your diploma, the thought of looking for a job might fill you with dread and terror. If you are heading to college in the fall, you might be brimming with anticipation. A new exhibition and a Web site have some advice to offer you. 
At the University of Washington, a group of 14 graduate students in the museology program have been developing an exhibition to "explore the ways social technology can support educational, dynamic, personally relevant exhibit experiences."
Through the use of user submitted emails, voicemails, tweets, and photographs the Advice: Give It, Get it, Flip it, F*** it! exhibition is using what we might call the "PostSecret model" of populism to better understand how art and communication revive or diminish the experience of the social.
By relying on user submissions, the exhibition has an element of community already structured into its foundation, but by its reliance on mediation in the form of phones, computers and cameras, there is also an element of isolation and unreality, transforming these interpersonal dicta into a transmission at least once removed from its sender.
Whereas advice used to come directly from the mouths of family, friends, teachers and mentors, now it comes semi-anonymously, from strangers, through social media. My apologies for throwing you into an existential crisis at an already pivotal moment in your life, but the gnawing question at the heart of this exhibition is not "What am I going to do next?" but rather, "What is the social?" and "How can I experience it?"
My advice would be much the same as the submission from Quinn Dombrowski: "Go to Italy. Be a cobbler."
Advice: Give It, Get it, Flip it, F*** it! will be exhibited at the Husky Union Building at the University of Washington, June 6-8 from 9am-6pm daily.
