Gues post by Michael Whitehouse
People are saying that Facebook will be locked in. In techno speak, that means that Facebook will become a lynchpin service, a staple, an ineradicable part of the digital medium going forward. It's already most of the way there. It has spawned iterations, imitations, and generations. Facebook will soon surpass Yahoo to become the web's third biggest property behind Google and Microsoft. Google built the greatest information retrieval system in human history; Microsoft, for all its flaws, popularized GUI-based operation systems and built a universally-used productivity suite. What has Facebook given us? The social graph. All hail Facebook! Connector of people, monetizer of relationships.
But I don't want my social graph. I don't need a digital copy of my entourage, circa 1996, 1999, or 2003. It's not that I dislike these people; rather, I'm apathetic. Their lifestreams, fed to me daily in the Facebook news feed, arouse no emotion in me. Their trite, stultifying, and utterly vapid quality only induces boredom. They make my eyes glaze over.
I remember the old parties I used to go to in my late teens. Bunch of guys sitting around in a basement, smoking weed and guzzling 40s. Hip-hop in the background. Maybe somebody's girlfriend sitting on a couch to add an aura of heterosexual legitimacy. The stories that we laughed at then were already getting stale, their characters obsolescent, their lessons increasingly meaningless. But we had a coolness that was detached and hypercritical: we talked shit about everybody. We were young and unemployed, and we had nothing better to do.
Ten years later, and Facebook has frozen all these people in time for me. Frozen their faces, their strange relationships, their pictures, their thoughts, their babies and bibelots, their expletives, superlatives, and purgatives. The characters in the old stories are reified, except that now it's the former cool kids who are the losers. Still trapped in the topical banality of adolescence, they air their grievances, their triumps, and their perambulations as if these things still matter. Yes, you were at the supper club; yes, you were drinking Belvedere; yes, there were beautiful people there. Can we move on now?
If this is what gets locked in, I'll take a pass. I prefer a web that is exploratory and liberating--not one that encases me in the dull dodecahedron of relationships from my pre-digital life. Every time I load up Tweet Deck, I learn something. A link from Jay Rosen, a pithy bit of brilliance from Felix Salmon, a gem of a retweet originating from some obscure source. I breathe in the world. I don't know these people; they wouldn't recognize my face if I passed them in the street. But they enlighten me, they edify me. Twitter offers me access to a humming global ideaspace, while my Facebook social graph is roughly commensurate with my high school, my college, and my places of work. Guess which constituency has more interesting members?