Friday, May 7, 2010

You Are Not a Gadget and Fears of Facebook




Dogmatism is the first iteration of what, fermented tested and conjealed, is to become a robust belief. Here is a new one of mine:

If you are one of the 400 million people with a facebook account, and you've checked it this week, and you probably have then you're aware of their most recent manditory change. Facebook gave its participants an 'opportunity' to link whatever they wrote on their profiles under the interests, activities, places of work, education, 'fans of' sections to newly created pages for all of these schools, companies, bands, activities, objects, etc. What was not made explicit is that now facebook users can only list things in these sections of their profiles that already have pages. This is to say, Facebook has claimed the right to define within its own cyber universe what things do and do not qualify as interests/activities/schools/places of employment/things to be fans of.

Facebook is always making changes- in fact, the self-definition of what facebook is for is basically all that facebook is about. Up until this lastround, it's always struck me as really, uh, whiny, to problematize what facebook is doing- because the whole set up is a trivial entity, a distraction from what's 'real'....and besides, it only affects people who made the very active decision to be on facebook. Being on facebook is just another thing I am complcit in yet don't particularly believe is a good social change, and so I should not complain.
I am reading You Are Not A Gadget, by Jaron Lanier, and it is helping me to clarify my beliefs about the internet, with the hope that this will help me make choices I do believe model and reflect more positive change than negative. In this emerging context, I am totally up for whining about Facebook. I find this latest round of changes extremely problematic, both symbolically and pragmatically.
We haven't yet as a society fully interalized that the internet is space, subject to the same tensions and phenomena as physical land. This means that all the same fucked up stuff that goes on in physical space goes on here. The internet is an iteration of two architypal stories of physical space, both part myth and true in this and any other situation.

1) New institutions are the work of idealists, and that shit always gets corrupted:
The internet was invented by a lot of hard working volunteers, in an incredible act of collaboration. These people were visionaries and idealists, just like the inventors of any new interpersonal entity (community, country, economic system, technology) that manages to take hold. These people built the internet on common socialist ideals, in which the de-centralization of media and communications technology would lead to a more even distribution of economic, cultural, and ideological power. Now, corporate globalization and democratic capitalism are raiding this internet- because that's unfortunately the forces that are at play in our world right now. The internet is increasingly controlled by affluent white men and the corporations they run, because our world is in a pattern of colonizing, the internet is new territory, and that's what colonizers do to new territory.

2)Technology is the progression of our ability to be violent. That's not news and not new:
The internet was invented by the army. It is not suprising, that an institution designed for violence was the site of development of something that is now so hugely pervase in endless ways unrelated to war; technology is by definition an offshoot of human aggression. The tools we label 'technology' is an outpouring of competitive, violence, greed, possessiveness, gluttony-the most fundamental things about ourselves that we will never be rid of. The internet is the latest round of the military industrial complex- our passions, creative output, social interactions, and sense of convenience gobbled up by technological progress like any other human need.

Any internet version of a 'real world' activity exists in our collective memory as a supplement, but it isn't one anymore. E-mail is not a secondary version of mail...it's more like the other way around. We understand online maps as more real than paper ones- and in a way, they really are, since they are updated, who knows how often, without the It would be ridiculous to say that facebook is replacing friendship, that e-books will do away with paper books, that online shopping is replacing stores, or that internet dating is upending conventional courtship. But these things are profoundly affecting our perception of the institution of most practices in our lives: friendship, shopping, dating, consuming media, corresponding. An engineering change, like turning the 'interests' and 'likes' categories on a facebook profile from text boxes to in to hyperlinks picked from drop-down menus have a real effect in real space. Now the folks at facebook get to decide what an interest is, or what things can be liked.

Seems like a pretty benign change; and of course yes, mostly it is. But it feels symbolically crucial to me. Facebook's decision to make interests in to hyperlinks seems based in the belief that unbias is possible, that of course they will work hard to make every possible interest in to a hyperlink. But there is no such thing as unbias, and so whoever's job it is to make and monitor these pages will bring their subtle bias, attempting to evenhandedly make a format for the self-proclaimed interests of 400 million people all over the planet, from the idiotic to the extremely charged.

Where do these links go? to a newly created 'community page' that is mostly just a jazzed up version of the wikipedia entry for whatever the topic at hand is, plus a feed of posts anyone has made that relate to the topic. (I can't imagine how this would ever be pertinent to anyone) Thus, facebook is saying that espousing an interest in absolutely anything makes you part of a self-generating virtual community around that thing, whose definition of itself is self-generated through participation, according to the grand wikipedia concept of neutrality- which is that, if everyone invested enough in defining something works together to define it, their biases will cancel each other out.

I struggle with articulating what the bias is of internet crowd-generated wisdom. For now, I've been calling it the 'sanitized bias', for it's leaning toward people who are uncritical of technology enough to care to work on wikipedia definitions.

Most importantly, it is easy to forget that crowd-defined content (or what I'm learning is called 'cloud wisdom' in techier worlds) inhibits individual vision on a subject, and obscures whose greater structural vision is getting enacted. Collaboration is great, but ultimately it is the person designing the container for collaboration who has any substantive power. / By giving us all the power to generate content within certain formats, facebook and kind of the internet in general (like this blog!) give an illusion of democratization, while in fact consolidating power in to the hands of the container-makers.

We don't get any say in the containers on the internet. I wonder lately what it must feel like to be an engineer or a programmer, whether you'd really have a sense of how profoundly you are affecting the experience of being alive on the crowded hot flat flattening planet. I do not know anyone who has the power to engineer such social changes, and I do not feel any systems in place that help these people reflect, or that let us have a say in technological change, which is to say social change. These people who get a say- they are from the same aristocracy that has always had control. this is not new.

And so changes like how an 'interest' is defined and displayed on facebook is defined for all of us by the same lineage of affluence, on the same trajectory of imperialism. The internet is just the newest territory to stake claim in how those without the power, who are more and more of us, live their lives. This doesn't feel like a flattening economic world, this feels like new categories of persistent lack being carved out of the top of our economic ladder: creating intellectual poverty within the embarrassment of riches, reserving real agency for a smaller and smaller few, while the rest of us become subservient to our gadgets.





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