Zadie on Zuckerbergs Facebook

My reply to Bernnard...

Bernard Leckning has emerged from his busy world to comment on my previous post, which was a comment on an article by Zadie Smith about the value of Facebook as a means of social interaction. Heres what I think about he thinks about what I thought about what she links about Facebook (oh yeAH, I hope he replays to this :)...

One of Smith's generation-gap-pains is that she makes the assumption that you can only be interesting if you hide your "private life". Weather your honest with the people around about who you are (or not) making you "interesting" is very debatable. In my experience the loud, flamboyant types tend to have better parties. So "interesting", I would say, is highly subjective.

If FB is a waste of time then what is it about social interactions that is a waste of time. Why is Skype or email not a waste of time or the telephone? None of these alternatives that she offers up represent people 100%. One might even suggest face too face interaction doesn't even offer this. I would say it more comes down to the individual personality and their skill with the medium i.e. Miles Davis could express more with three button than I can in this entire rant!

"I think the idea of ‘sharing’ is a more powerful trope than ‘connection’ when it comes to exploring and explaining sociality online." 'Sharing' is a good observation and adds something new to the debate.

"The technology is neutral" as Chomsky observed of the internet. You CAN make friends purely via a FB connection. I've meet scores of people once at a gig, exchanged details and the next day we're "friends" on FB, and then, if we did have something in common and they are active on FB then we became real "friends". At the same time you can sleep with someone and still not be their friend the next morning (or even want to see them again). I think, as will all human relations, it comes down to the two people and how compatible they are not the platform they use to express it.

"Relationships emerges out of doing things together" so by this definition FB can allow friendships. The "doing together" on FB is of a active/passive nature but aren't all relationships we are not forced into by circumstance the same?

How does FB "limit relationships" while the telephone, Skype, email does not? When did you have a moment when you thought "Facebook is getting in the way here of my relationship with X growing/changing/etc"? It doesn't happen! Mainly because when FBs dimensions are too few we use another medium to augment the relationship, which also might not offer 100% mind melding, but as I said: Just a tool.

I think Zadie's real problem with FB is the labeling. She not up-in-arms about LinkedIn which is essentially offering all the same functionality as FB (less even) but instead of labeling your connections as "friends" it calls them "Contacts" or "Connections". Perhaps this is enough to set the agenda for the site which in the case of LinkedIn is business contacts, while with FB its personal contacts (how dare they!).

I think in the future there will actually be tens of thousands of FB type sites. One for every type of community in the world. The main thing that will tear FB down, I think, or at least dilute it, is the fact that People enter via the front door and Suckerburg lets in the marketing creeps in our back doors. Which will become so unpleasant and there will be an easy, alternative, private network(s) (the bittorrent of social networking I'm guessing) that there will be no need for FB and it will go the way of the BBS, MySpace, Friendster etc etc.

I think you should question Progress, but that has never stopped it :)

Sarah's reply to me...

Firstly, I don't think Zadie's review (yes, review of the film, not research paper on facebook) is based on her dislike for Zuckerberg. But even if she does dislike him somewhat, for who he is and what he created, things that she's exploring through this article, I think it's interesting to leak a little personal reaction occasionally, we are human after all. It's what I would expect from a person. I think she doesn't hide what dislike she does have for him, which is honest, refreshing. But no, I don't think it's the driver of the article.

What I think is really exciting about her piece is exactly what she is excited about in the book that she reviews, 'you are not a gadget'. The author proposes that these applications can mould the way we are, the way we think and act; that the tools that we've formed form us in return though our use of them. Understandably he/she is not lumping our evolutionary and social development entirely on to the foibles of these tools, but yes, I do also think that we adapt to the material and virtual frameworks that we build around us. It's an interesting perspective to consider.

Lanier says, in relation to information systems

"Different media designs stimulate different potentials in human nature. We shouldn’t seek to make the pack mentality as efficient as possible. We should instead seek to inspire the phenomenon of individual intelligence".

I think this is important. And no, you don't have view Facebook as the only prism through which people are viewed, presented and defined, but I think it is really important to look at the way that it does create a uniform personality. Everyone sounds the same on Facebook. Just to defend myself from your attack, I'll qualify. In my opinion, when I look at people's comments and photos on facebook, I feel that there is a certain bland sameness that pervade all comments, all pictures, all links and posts, full of smart one liners that I don't hear them say. And positivity out your ears. Boring congeniality and content for content's sake. Ok, there is one person I know who is refreshingly transfers their strange monologues to their facebook, but that is only one. And he generally sits outside the sane. And perhaps Zadie is on to something when she says it may be the public nature of it that creates these sanitised feeds, the need for self censorship in a very public forum. It is hard to develop ideas through congeniality.

I don't get the feeling that she 'hates' facebook at all. There is no seething unreasonableness, just her ideas and opinions wanting to start a debate. She demands that its users reflect. She demands something more than what it offers. I think it is valid.

Yes.