[Air-L] With Friends Like Facebook ....

[Terri Senft]

Tom Hodgkinson hates Facebook. That much I believe, though I have
trouble understanding exactly why, or more importantly, what he really
proposes his readers ought to do about its nascent dangers to
civilization.

Hodgkinson begins his piece with the 'gloomy image' of a friend who
recently spent a Saturday night with Facebook, drinking at his desk.
It's not the drinking that bothers Hodgkinson (who advocates the pub
over the computer), but what he perceives as the loneliness of the
situation. This raises the question: would Hodgkinson object if his
friend were to throw back a few pints while making phone calls? That's
another behavior that seems as if it is being done alone, when viewed
from the outside.

One thing that makes Facebook different from the telephone is that it
permits users to post flattering pictures, some of which permit an
"artificial representation" designed to get sex or approval, argues
Hodgkinson. Leaving aside that this sounds like a good description of
Guardian personal ads, one wonders how Hodgkinson reconciles the
'loneliness' of Facebook with the fact that his friend used it to find
someone for a shag (I'm assuming it was an offline one.)

Moving from the personal to the political, Hodgkinson follows the
money behind Facebook, demonstrating how this purportedly democratic
medium is actually dominated by libertarian wack jobs. Here, he is
late to the show. As the military was to Arpanet, so have
conservatives been to the Web, almost from its inception. Am I the
only one old enough to remember how early issues of Wired featured
economic advisors to Ronald Reagan in their pages?


Seemingly unaware that writers have been discussing VC's 'California
Ideology' for more than twenty years, Hodgkinson tells us what his
real problem is: "On Facebook, you can be free to be who you want to
be, as long as you don't mind being bombarded by adverts for the
world's biggest brands."

Really?

Does anyone under the age of forty believe you can be 'anything you
want to be' on the Web? Does anyone of any age believe any social
spaces exist free of ads? Has Hodgkinson ever used Google, which also
matches his preferences to advertised products, and doesn't have a
'community' to even voice opposition to its practices?

"Clearly," writes Hodgkinson, "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?"

Here I am baffled. I thought Hodgkinson's point all along was that
Facebook users weren't friends (like those down at the pub friends
whom you drink with and remember so well the next day) but rather
consumers. If this is the case, why should Facebook's uber-capitalism
operate differently than that of any other commercial entity?

In the same vein, I don't understand the upset over globalized
communications. After all, the same nation-free Web that runs Facebook
is the one that allows me to see Hodgkinson's article in rural
Florida. Isn't that okay? When he warns that Facebook presents an
"ideologically motivated virtual totalitarian regime with a population
that will very soon exceed the UK's," I begin worrying over this
reporter's mental state.

Virtual.totalitarian.regime.

 "Facebook is profoundly uncreative," argues Hodgkinson. "It makes
nothing at all." While one might take issue with the idea that
Facebook users don't make anything (what are all those ancillary
applications I keep getting notices about?) I understand the
sentiment. Facebook is all connection. There's no there there.

 Yet is the commercialized commaraderie of Facebook really all that
different from Hodgkinson's beloved local? The next time you walk into
what seems to be a time-worn yet slightly hip pub in London, check to
see if all the silverware is gathered in a bucket on the table with a
rolled up bar menu inside. If it is, you've wandered into one of the
deliberately 'unbranded' establishments of restaurant and bar giant
Mitchell's and Butler. While you have a pint and bemoan the state of
the internet (or locally owned pubs), go ahead and excuse yourself to
use the bathroom. Inside of five minutes, you'll be staring at
advertising in what used to be the most non-commercial of spaces: the
toilets.

I suppose my point in all this is that the invasion of global capital
into formerly private domains is hardly specific to virtual systems
like Facebook. Like Hodgkinson, I worry about Facebook's data mining
and its proprietary structure, but to be honest, I worry more about
Google's helpful offer to control all the digital copies of books in
the world. The main difference between Hodgkinson's position and mine
is that I don't think a trip off the grid is the way out.

Near the end of his article, Hodgkinson mentions philosopher René
Girard. One of Girard's specialties is mimesis: the theory of
imitation. Hodgkinson chooses to understand mimesis as 'herd
mentality.' I prefer to remember Aristotle's treatment of mimesis. In
the Poetics, Aristotle takes on Plato's desire to toss all performers
out of the Republic for being dangerous dissemblers. Too virtual, we'd
say today. To temper Plato, Aristotle distinguishes between two forms
of imitation. The first--mimicry--constitutes a poor form of
imitation; the kind Plato felt harmed the Republic, and the kind
Hodgkinson links to locales like Facebook. The other form of
imitation--mimesis--Aristotle saw as an often unexpected act in which
the imitator stumbles on something larger than him or herself, and
notices "art, beauty, love, pleasure and truth," as Hodgkinson would
put it.

As someone who studies social networks, I can attest that one needn't
run to Keats's Endymion to find the mimetic impulse. Like a flower
growing from a dung heap, it flourishes in the strangest locales. The
trick Internet ethnographers have learned (and I wish a few reporters
could pick up) is to remember that one wants to find a rose in shit,
it's best to stop focusing on smell and start looking for color,
wherever one is.



On Jan 17, 2008 7:39 PM, Charles Ess <charles.ess at gmail.com> wrote:
> While a little stale now...
> Kathleen commented,
>
>
> > Which is to say that your profile remains on the network even if you
> > pull it -- shambling on in a zombie-like state, perhaps, accruing but
> > failing to respond to pokes and wall posts, but still there,
> > nonetheless....
> Well, in my case, this pretty well describes my current "active" profile ...
> (smile - sorry, couldn't resist the joke)
>
>
> More seriously, Kathleen wrote:
> > there's a real technological overdetermination that hasn't yet
> > been fully explored
> agreed - one more form, it seems, of digital immortality whether we will
> (ala Ray Kurzweil) or no ...
> along with copyright and property issues (while the Facebook Terms of
> Service acknowledge an automatic - but non-exclusive - copyright on the part
> of profile "owners" to whatever they post, FB further claims a right into
> perpetuity to use everything posted there)
> -- some of which may be peculiar to Facebook, and others more generic ...
>
> And just to make it all more complicated ...
> Ray Land notes:
>
> > There is a delicate ethical issue too for formal programmes that are studying
> > these social technologies and which therefore more or less oblige their
> > students to participate in them. However a counter-argument would be that if
> > you don't kow what's going inside such environments you won't be in an
> > informed position to critique them.
> Exactly -
> An additional, perhaps even more fuzzy and ambiguous area: I find being able
> to explore my students' FB profiles to be a very helpful technique / trick
> in establishing rapport, etc.  It would be a pity to lose that capability, I
> think.
>
> There is also the utility - at least on rare occasion - of people
> discovering and forestalling Bad Things - e.g., a school shooting - by
> poking around on FB and MS profiles ...
>
> Finally, I was actually crafting an apology, worrying that my expressed
> disagreement with neoconservative / technolibertarian viewpoints might have
> sent the wrong message about diversity of opinion on the list, etc - when
> Jacob Kramer-Duffield spoke up, nicely disagreeing ...
>
> So, if anyone is still reading this far ...
>
> > Really, this is all a bit silly. Did you stop using Microsoft products
> > because Bill Gates is a big-time Republican? No, you stopped using
> > Microsoft products (or, I suppose didn't) because of their utility or
> > lack thereof. It's even more true for Facebook, as a website (albeit a
> > social hub of a website) rather than an OS or core program.
> Well, I take your point - but FWIW, I'm a little happier using MS products
> (when nothing else OS will do) knowing that ol' Bill is now busy giving a
> lot of his/our money away for ostensibly worthy things.
>
> I also appreciated and agreed with a number of your further comments - but,
> like  Ray and Peter, I don't agree with the final point:
>
> >> Should we be thinking about pulling our profiles?
>
> > Only if you don't like being there, or aren't getting what you want or
> > need out of it.
> As they have also expressed - I do think there are ethical lines (usually
> very broad and fuzzy, but there it is) to be drawn regarding what we buy,
> consume, and thereby support.  "Don't buy books from crooks" was the phrase
> in the 1960s, referring to all the Watergate scoundrels (if not traitors)
> who started to make a killing selling their memoirs.  By the same token,
> these days I don't think we should buy chocolate made with slave / child
> labor, for (an easy) example.
> For a harder example: I am genuinely torn between wanting to withdraw from
> FB immediately, and knowing that doing so (a) will  cut off an important
> channel of communication with my students (and a nice one with many
> colleagues and friends) and (b) at least raise some issues regarding the
> work and research of a whole lotta folk on this that/whom I really respect
> and admire. (Ex.: a good friend and colleague invited me to a new game on
> FB, in part because the discussion boards are featuring important _ethical_
> discussions about cheating, etc.  GREAT STUFF!!!  Someone really ought to be
> looking at it!)
> etc.
> Cordially,
> - charles ess
>
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Dr. Theresa M. Senft
Senior Lecturer, Media Studies
School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural Studies
University of East London
Docklands Campus
4-6 University Way
London E162RD

www.terrisenft.net
www.livejournal.com/users/tsenft