The question: is facebook a fad or a permanent fixture of the internet? To me, social networking is not a fad. As its natural conclusion, it will displace google, and mobile-network services (eg. sms, calls).
Fad:
1) The social-communication functions which facebook optimizes can be performed more effectively with mobile connections. Also, it does not introduce fundamental changes in the demands of the way we communicate over the web.
- Facebook is essentially a form of entertainment, whose medium are memes, photos, quotes, and 9gag links. These are fads. Counter: Facebook shares these. It can conceivably integrate new fads.
Permanent fixture:
1) Facebook connectivity is structural. Social information-sharing will become the main engine of information-distribution on the internet. The evolution of this information sharing will depend largely on the share options provided by Facebook.
2) The internet is an information bank. Information-acquisition is either personal or social. Personal information acquisition is conditioned by individual conditions. You need to research something - go to google. You want entertainment - go to youtube, and so on. Facebook is different. You do not know what you want when you go to Facebook. So unlike google or youtube, there is no initial goal. Why? Because the information I get on facebook is socially conditioned, a forum of friends. I am part of that social condition. Joining that social condition is called facebooking.
(Anything phenomenologically 'Real' is social, or personified. Facebook personifies the Internet as lifestyle space, makes it Real in that sense. The benefit is that this personification is precisely a corresponding mimicry of the real-world social.)
So we are in conversation in an imaginary space of friends. What kinds of ideals do Facebook represent, socially? Who is facebook? A memorable conversation with your best friend? The best night out? The desire to idealize social space.
3) The oligopolisation of information over the internet. The decreasing role of Google search and small sites. Personal expression converging in public mediums and forms. The culturalization of the web accelerates with the concentration of expression in a series of facebookable forms, providing fresh principles for creativity. Very quick cycles of forms, requiring new updates and options.
Fad? No. At worst a slow decline.
Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label facebook. Show all posts
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Friday, March 09, 2012
Facebook Thoughts 1
What is Facebook for? Its for connecting with people you know on the web.
Its for turning the web and internet surfing, which has taken a life of its own as a lifestyle trend, as something you must do because it fills a need in real life, into something more familiar. It humanizes the web.
The web is a confusing, repetitive, boring, place. It is an essentially boring and inhuman place. Yes, it interests you, but it interests you only within the context of your boredom and frustration in real life. You wouldn't be on the internet if you had real stuff to do, or if the world was in your control. You'd be using it like a upgraded form of email, if life was swell. The internet is another medium of art, art being a re-creation of reality in higher forms to satisfy something lacking in the real. (In fact, the internet is THE medium of art of today, websites being hyper-democratic art forms: one can on this basis alone predict the drive to aesthetic complexity of website design as architectural spaces of communication.)
Virtual is an always an inferior reality, but it is a superior form to non-reality, which is its role to substitute.
Social networking works on this essential frustration - it is promise of socialist utopia in its most inferior imaginable form.
Now, you will dismiss: this is the rambling of a sad loner; one who does not realize that Facebook is the most efficient means of concerning yourself adequately intimately with the life of a large circle of busy and interesting friends, and therefore with the life of the community as a whole - it is an information bank and an actionable tool in the social arsenal. Perhaps. I concede. But it is both.
Then: A measure of the degree of social deficit and deficits in other modes of social interaction. Lovely.
Its for turning the web and internet surfing, which has taken a life of its own as a lifestyle trend, as something you must do because it fills a need in real life, into something more familiar. It humanizes the web.
The web is a confusing, repetitive, boring, place. It is an essentially boring and inhuman place. Yes, it interests you, but it interests you only within the context of your boredom and frustration in real life. You wouldn't be on the internet if you had real stuff to do, or if the world was in your control. You'd be using it like a upgraded form of email, if life was swell. The internet is another medium of art, art being a re-creation of reality in higher forms to satisfy something lacking in the real. (In fact, the internet is THE medium of art of today, websites being hyper-democratic art forms: one can on this basis alone predict the drive to aesthetic complexity of website design as architectural spaces of communication.)
Virtual is an always an inferior reality, but it is a superior form to non-reality, which is its role to substitute.
Social networking works on this essential frustration - it is promise of socialist utopia in its most inferior imaginable form.
Now, you will dismiss: this is the rambling of a sad loner; one who does not realize that Facebook is the most efficient means of concerning yourself adequately intimately with the life of a large circle of busy and interesting friends, and therefore with the life of the community as a whole - it is an information bank and an actionable tool in the social arsenal. Perhaps. I concede. But it is both.
Then: A measure of the degree of social deficit and deficits in other modes of social interaction. Lovely.
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