GAZPACHOT: Why Facebook Sucks...
Facebook is just about my worst nightmare. What a shallow vortex. Yes, sure, the tingly thrill, the thrill of people! All that attention from the past and present. All the faces, all the old crushes and curiosities. The drug of memory, the afrodisiac of the past, the cartoon concepts of important people who want y-o-u, without all that stench and awkwardness of actual human life. So this is it - the future!
So what? We're staining our social fabric with this?
I simply don't buy these bullshit "connections." As far as I can tell, two weeks into this experiment, there's no substance. It's an extended high school popularity contest for people who can't let those glory days go. It plays/preys on people's desperation to be included. Really what gets me though is the brazen insult it heaves at technology's potential to offer amazing new forms of communication.

GAZPACHOT: Arcadias and Guantanamos of technology...
I like the iPhone. It's user-made applications are great. Still in the cutesy phase, but I see tremendous potential. This is a piece of technology that can evolve and we can teach it to do many things. Getting back to my vs Facebook, this is just a dead white box that provides a rigid system of rules and cues as to how one should behave in a public space. does it? I mean, the format is not itself int, but how restrictive is it? It's so conservative!! Here's your little text box. Write something cute and clever. Ding! People like you! It has huge ramifications on our collective notion of social space. Facebook is such a small unimaginative place to gather. It reduces us to the banal details of our days well they did change the prompt at the text box from ~What are you doing? to~ What's on your mind? (did anyone write about, comment on that? seems a move toward encouraging more kinds of text box entries, right? more openness?) and leaves us only with our futile attempts to punch our way out of its monotony. It sets the bars low and we look out from behind them, unwilling to own up to the cage around us. what would it like to set the bars high higher no bars? what would an imaginative online gathering place be?

~ an open empty space ~ YOU CAN DO WHATEVER YOU LIKE

#but we had homepages
and people seemed to default to a boring format of static self presentation:
'I am so&so, this is my homepage, here is my resume; my list of interests; my writing; my art, my family photos.'
# then blogs
which seem to improve on this, maybe, by adding the backward chronology device (a restriction, but a fruitful one?) but people will do as they do, and Gazpachot is one of only a few I find using the blog format in a way of their own, expression of self that strikes me as genuine, interesting, lovely, thoughtful. art!
where more of the blogs I see have a boringly conventional tone (& topics) of day-to-day self-presentation:
'I did this, here is my glib comment on that ... this is how I view myself as an object ~ from the outside ~ as I expect you to see me. 'I am this kind of guy. These are twenty five things about me. It took me a long time to realize that you know what? you don't have to read the whole book if you don't like it! life is too short! Here's what I overheard on the bus this morning. Here's an anecdote about that weird guy at work. Here's my smart flippant attitude about the strangeness of life. Here's my distinctive favoring of the word discombulate (how come it's never just 'combobulate'? and other peculiarities I've observed); of the word spurious; of randomness; ridiculousness. Here's I as an earnest but insincere and unoriginal presentation to the generic audience.'
This. characterization I'm giving, the cliches of tone and topic, these do sound like high school to me, or earlier. adolescence. is that an actual phenomenon? maybe some kinds of adolescents (eg 'educated', that's what I'm thinking right? ~privileged).
adolescents. relatively new to being a person, well, to seeing oneself as a person in the view of the others = a presentation, a character -- and there are typical ways of inhabiting this newness? the way I'm so bothered by, which persists especially in social settings and in writing, has this glibness ~ this liking to characterize things as strange & ridiculous ~ this callous enactment of knowingness.
pretension, I guess. I guess pretention and newness go together.
sure: you pretend to something that you have not yet really inhabited.
you may think you are inhabiting it. you don't know (yet) what it would feel like if you were ~

m said...

Well, the thrill of people (as you said in your earlier post), yes. People gathering can be thrilling or pleasant or frightening or nauseating, for me. Names & faces of the present, past, further past. People evidence of whom could not before be easily found if I searched the internet using google. And now, here so many of them are, findable, viewable, messagable. I like that at first, then I dislike it. Now everyone persists. Before there was so much disappearance: acquaintances from one place or phase of life becoming only what I remember, only in my mind. Facebook confronts me with their continued reality, and presents to me --through the feed of their text box entries-- these various people mixed together: the friends from middle school when I lived on an American army base in Germany, the friends from the States who I knew before & after that, then from one high school, then from another, from one college, from another, from one city, from another. All still out there keeping on keeping on, and my access to them --at least initially ~ because we can always leave the party & go to our own place to keep talking, right?-- but initially, the access to all these people is through the same interface, has the same frame of the Facebook pageview, presenting them all together, so that the associations of each to a specific place & time of my life is flattened. But, despite my discomfort, is this for the better? To confront me with more of an outer reality, to intrude upon my mental world, where these people had populated only the memories I place them in?
what do you think?

And, that little text box. Well, but you can write whatever you want, you can say whatever you like. anything you like! sing: "you can vote however you like. I said, you can vote however you like.'
and can't our use of Facebook not be about collecting friends, about being popular? can it be about saying things you want to say, seeing what other people have to say, responding to what interests you, interacting?
People gather, and many talk about mostly the banal details of their details, but in this or whatever gathering place, we *can* talk about whatever we want.
Can't we? please?

5:34 PM