April 9, 2007

• Facebook Offers Information Fanatics Fast Fix

  As a result of something less than my own pure volition, I have a Facebook.  It was a simple process really: I clicked a few buttons after someone sent me an invite to get a Facebook via email, and I now have one. 

  Basically, Facebook is an amelioration of MySpace via changes in orginazational structure and overall lineaments.  To put it more simply, Facebook looks like MySpace if a sanitation crew cleaned it up and a guy with a brain redesigned it.  If MySpace is the glittery closet of a teenage girl, Facebook is the desk of a white-collar employee.  If MySpace is a messy coloring book, Facebook is a Da Vinci masterpiece.  If MySpace is a dump, Facebook is a sanitation center.  Well, you get the idea. 

  However, as I will explain, I am not a fan of Facebook.  Besides, it really isn’t much of an endorsement to say something is good compared to MySpace.  MySpace really is the worst idea since the electoral college.  Somehow, however, through shiny colors or what not, it has gained popularity.  But since Facebook has been steadily growing, and MySpace has been gradually declining, my attention now turns to Facebook as the heir to the throne of Blogdom.  To see my thoughts on MySpace go here:  http://www.xanga.com/StrokeofThought/515134787/item.html

  First, a brief description of the unique aspects of Facebook.  There are two main defining features that separate Facebook from the rest of the Social Networks.  First, in sacrificing a small piece of customization, Facebook has withheld control of background preference from the user and has preset every single Facebooker’s page to the default color of white.  Everywhere you go it is white from top to bottom, almost as though Facebook were trying to induce a feeling of a Heavenly blog where all we have to do is imagine the angels and harps to complete the experience.  This is where the analogy of Facebook as a sanitation center comes in.  Its pristine white visage glows in your face incessantly, like having dinner with a true Irishman. 

  The second of Facebook’s two defining features is its tell-all “News Feed.”  When you sign on to Facebook, the News Feed is the first page that appears.  Somewhat like a Buzz Lightyear mission log, the News Feed is a detailed account of all your friend’s recent Facebook activity.  That is what it is definitionally, whereas literally it is the ceaseless inpouring of a seemingly infinite amount of banal minutiae: it reports all your friends’ activities from picture changes, to “favorite music” changes, to group changes (leaving them/joining them), to mood changes.  It’s like being a police officer with a police radio, only you’re a Facebooker with a News Feed.  Could information ever be more accessible … or mind-numbing? 

  Like MySpace, and in opposition to Xanga, Facebook is centered around the profile and personal information.  Whereas in Xanga the viewer’s immediate attention on any site is directed toward the Xangan’s most recent post, in Facebook it is directed toward mostly the same things as MySpace, with a few trendy additions: the typical is showing your sexual preference, hometown, relationship status, what sort of relationships the person is looking for, political views, religious views, and then the massive listings of activities, interests, favorite music, favorite TV shows, favorite movies, favorite books, favorite quotes, and then (ironically), an “about me” section.  But wait! Beyond all that you may also know the person’s educational and employment history and description.  With how many favorites of this or that people have, reading them becomes much like reading the daily stock market changes in the paper. 

  An implication of the vast sea of information included on anyone’s site is that when any of it is altered it will (conveniently?) show up on your News Feed.  Thank goodness for that.  Fear not, your friend Liz took ACDC off of her favorite music, but you know about it.  This is a serious thing.  Such actions need to be exposed publicly and be put out in the open so that all her friends can know of the occurrence of Liz’s dramatic actions.  Why does Liz no longer like ACDC?  Does she need help?  Is she changing her life’s direction away from such “things” as ACDC?  I must speak with her about this.  And WHAT?  Why on Earth does Mark no longer like Lost in Translation as one of his favorite movies?!  Has he lost his MIND?!

  However, the News Feed is not the primary reason I dislike Facebook.  Rather, it is the pervading sense I get when I am on the site.

  Whenever I am on Facebook, as a total effect of the features I mentioned above, I feel vaguely like I am inside of a scientific experiment.  It’s almost like Facebook is just one big scientific laboratory. It’s reminiscient of the huge germ-free, white room where government scientists in labcoats work with microscopes and rats.  Think about it.  Everything is white, neat, systematic, pristine, organized, and monitored.  Needless data about every Facebooker exists abundantly everywhere I click.  The status, i.e. current mood, of every Facebooker is available directly on their page, and if it changes it is reported directly to my omniscient “News Feed.”  It’s like every Facebooker is not even an actual human being, but rather a “test subject” that is being systematically catalogued in this rigid paradigm called “Facebook.”  It’s a huge orginizational machine of information and systematized data.  In fact, on each Facebooker’s page is a personal News Feed called a “Mini-Feed” that shows specifically all the recent activities of that Facebooker.  Of course, times are reported for when all reported activities occurred. 

  What MySpace underdid, becoming an anarchy of stalkers and sexual perverts, Facebook has overdone, becoming a totalitarian Social Network better organized than the D-Day invasion of Normandy.  In a fashion disconcertingly similar to a laboratory documentation, every person’s page is their closely monitored and registered “personal file” in which the slightest adjustment of information will be automatically reported to every one of their friends.  On your friends’ pages are the dry facts of the amount of mutual friends you share, how you know that peson, and what groups they have joined.  Facebook is the ultimate culmination of the history of science and the social world, all compressed into one website.  Strangely enough, with how prevalently white and systematically organized Facebook is, the closest comparison I can find to it is an insane asylum. 

  Replacing the endless quest for “friends” on MySpace is the unspoken competition for “wall posts” on Facebook.  Each test subject is given a wall, on which the other test subjects may then write their peculiar sayings.  Some accumulate thousands of wall posts.  As usual, this is all reported to the all-knowing News Feed.  Or perhaps you would like to look at the test subject’s photos.  You of course know the test subject has photos, since the addition of photos was reported to, yep, you guessed it, your News Feed.  And, if you should so choose to comment on one of the test subject’s photos the exciting news bit of you commentng on a photo will in turn be sent to every one of that test subject’s friends’ News Feeds.   Yes, exhilerating, I know. 

  Besides the endless informational log and white contours to give the site the feel of a scientific laboratory, each Facebooker is grouped into a “Network” based off of their school or geographical location.  To me, the test subjects are being grouped accordingly.  It’s like they’re the different test groups.  Categorizing people geographically by such an exact method should be the illuminating sign to people that they are in a pedantically organized system, one freakishly like a scientific experiment.

  But perhaps it works for some people.  If you’re the sort of person that has always wished to get reports on the daily growth of your grass, and on other equally important items, then Facebook is for you.  If you overstock on school supplies every year and have your closet organized into obsessively neat sections, then you will like Facebook.  If your walls are a bland white and you clean things out of instinct, then Facebook will suit your taste.  And finally, if you’ve always wanted to write an autobiography, but would settle for paraphrasing your life story via a complete listing of your favorite music, TV shows, movies, books, and quotes, then Facebook was made for you.  

  As for me, Xanga is my home.  I am not running an enterprise here, as I feel I am on Facebook, but rather I just write my thoughts.  That is truly a beautiful simplicity.  Just thoughts.  Facebook seems to be approaching the limit of trying to replicate actual real-life friendships as closely as possible and putting them into an ordered system.  Anything that appears to be attempting to simulate real life, or even arguably outdo it, makes me instantly skeptical.  My Xanga is not me.  I am not words on a page.  I am not my favorite things.  I am not my interests.  I have never used Xanga as a replacement for real life, only as a place for recording thoughts, which makes its role strictly supplemental.  But it is not me.  You want to know me?  Maybe I’ll run into you in a bookstore sometime and we can chat. 

  Facebook seems to me like a controlled scientific laboratory.  In history, most interaction has been face-to-face.  Now it’s facebook-to-facebook.  This is a major shift.  Actual faces are now perhaps coincidental in our interaction.  What would history think of this?  What would medieval peasants think of this?  This is the first generation to do this.  Before we dive in headfirst, what should we think of this?

  • 10:53 pm
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