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?
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?
Sounds like you need to unfriend some people.
ReplyDeleteI found this piece through Twitter and couldn't agree with you more - especially your last paragraph. Unfortunately I feel compelled to keep my facebook account. And the only thing I believe that keeps it useful is how it represents my address book, in a visual way. And instead of wondering if i should write someone to check in on them, I first look to see if they are up to anything worth asking about. That might be really cynical, but it's the truth. And I'm sure they feel the same way about me. I've been using twitter as my rss feed and think it's amazing. anyway, great piece. thanks for writing it.
ReplyDeleteI think it was Groucho Marx who said something like he wouldn't want to join a club that would have him as a member. Twitter allows us to do precisely that - follow anyone you find interesting, for any reason. Facebook's symmetrical follow rules can lock you in to clubs that would welcome you, and I guess that's the point here. That being said, though, I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with that. Different platforms for different purposes.
ReplyDeleteEr, the point is Mr. Whitehouse hasn't changed since high school as well?
ReplyDeleteYou hung out with awful people; let them remain as reminders so as not to repeat it in the future. ;-)
ReplyDeleteI cannot agree more. People say FaceBook is taking over the earth, and I use it too, but that's mostly for keeping the existing connection warm, not for exploring new possibilities (that's what the Internet is about, right?) I use Twitter too for meeting new people: when I communicate with people who have similar ideal but various backgrounds I feel I am broadening my world, in real time. Maybe I can even connect with people with totally different thinking...
ReplyDeletelol this is serious! this whole blog is mostly about facebook, u r starting a facebookphobia! =P
ReplyDelete