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January 16, 2008
The early Australian reaction to Facebook has often been a critical one--witness this piece by Guy Rundle at Crikey. Rundle says that:
After the novelty of having 900 'friends' wears off, people will find that, though useful, social networking is cold and non-reciprocal, the measure of an atomised society rather than the answer to it.
Social interaction is debased (cold and non-reciprocal) by being online is Rundle's argument. Surely, Facebook is another form of social interaction (networking) that supplements the face-to-face one. In the impersonal cities where I live and work, no one looks each other in the eye or speaks to strangers on the bus. Yet there is warmth bubbling away online. A good response to Rundle is given by Mark Bahnisch at Larvatus Prodeo. He suggests that Facebook won't pale into yesterday's fad, like the dot.com boom.
Now we have Tom Hodgkinson's op-ed in The Guardian on Facebook. He sure doesn't like the Facebook networking form of online presence, and he wants to campaign against the substitution of digital networking for real life. He starts by introducing the narcissism argument:
Facebook appeals to a kind of vanity and self-importance in us, too. If I put up a flattering picture of myself with a list of my favourite things, I can construct an artificial representation of who I am in order to get sex or approval. ("I like Facebook," said another friend. "I got a shag out of it.") It also encourages a disturbing competitivness around friendship: it seems that with friends today, quality counts for nothing and quantity is king. The more friends you have, the better you are. You are "popular", in the sense much loved in American high schools.
The implication is that Facebook, nay the blogosphere, is ruled by a "lust for recognition." But don't we all have public masks? Why is a digital mask vain and narcissistic when the non-digital face (personality) is okay? Isn't Facebook more than that superficial kind of social networking of being popular? Flickr.com, the photo website, is a well-regarded pioneer because it served a brilliant purpose: making it simple to share your pictures with family and friends. Facebook allows you to connect up with people with similar interests---an example. What has yet to happen is doing something constructive with this kind of network. It is not obvious that the software driving Facebook prevents this from happening.
Hodgkinson asks: does Facebook really connect people? His reply is:
Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.
Why amusing photos instead of good or meaningful ones? An online presence is different from face-to face presence and it can lead to face-to face contact for some. But this possibility is not explored. Instead we Facebook users are damned because we are alone, depressed addicts and chained to our desks--ie., we are the depressed slaves of technology. This is technological determinism with a vengeance that is coupled with the blogo-barbarians pounding on the gates of civilization.
Hodgkinson digs behind the surface to the ethos behind Facebook and he discovers that it is about venture capitalists making money and libertarianism. On the capitalism bit Hodgkinson says:
Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway....The creators of the site need do very little bar fiddle with the programme. In the main, they simply sit back and watch as millions of Facebook addicts voluntarily upload their ID details, photographs and lists of their favourite consumer objects.
Isn't the lefty Guardian also about making money? So is it the easy money return on the capital that is the issue? Or the idea of the global village? Hodgkinson then describes the libertarianism thus:
Here at last is the Enlightenment state longed for since the Puritans of the 17th century sailed away to North America, a world where everyone is free to express themselves as they please, according to who is watching. National boundaries are a thing of the past and everyone cavorts together in freewheeling virtual space. Nature has been conquered through man's boundless ingenuity.
This is the standard public philosophy of the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, is it not? I'm not sure that Facebook can be junked because of that public philosophy. Like Flickr, Facebook depends on how good and useful it is in helping us to engage in social networking.
He ends by saying that he will have nothing to do with :
this heavily-funded programme to create an arid global virtual republic,where your own self and your relationships with your friends are converted into commodites on sale to giant global brands. ... For my own part, I am going to retreat from the whole thing, remain as unplugged as possible, and spend the time I save by not going on Facebook doing something useful, such as reading books. And if I want to connect with the people around me, I will revert to an old piece of technology. It's free, it's easy and it delivers a uniquely individual experience in sharing information: it's called talking.
This is heroic Luddite silliness--all anti-technology posturing. You can read books, talk to friends and connect through Facebook. It's not an either or choice at all. Nor is it treated as such.
So we have cultural conservatism appearing in a lefty newspaper that iis endeavouring to inoculate itself against the Internet's excesses. The days of wine and old-fashioned cafes)gives way to an equally unrecognizable dystopia where our laptops "socially and psychologically cut us off from our fellow caffeine drinkers, thereby destroying "the concrete, undeniable, immutable fact of our being in the world." Etc etc.
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I don't get the point of Facebook, but I haven't bothered figuring out what it's supposed to do.
Saskia Sassen said somewhere that people who poo poo the internet don't use it and don't understand it. A lot of what goes on is pretty useless, but I have yet to see a convincing argument that it's in some way harmful. The worst thing I'm aware of is the time sink angle. People spending their time poking one another on networking sites when they're supposed to be working. Companies will eventually use that to increase surveillance in workplaces, which is a lot worse than trying to sell people Coke via Facebook.