Mass Media Pt. 3: Facebook and the Lifestream, or Should life be a stream?
Taking Seratoninronin’s apt criticisms to heart on my first post in this series, I took a break in order to both catch up on my collegiate studies (still lagging pretty far behind, damn you Japanese I) and to rethink my approach in regard to it. I take his silence in the comments section as a victory; there was nothing so obviously off there as to prompt an attack. So I’m returning to the series.
In the meantime I read a good number of pieces from the John Hanhardt edited reader Video Culture: A Critical Investigation. While the reader is a quite handy and thorough collection of pieces on the topic, from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” onward. McLuhan is wrongly represented in essay after essay as the herald of some sort of electronic utopia, which makes me wonder how deeply any of the various essayists researched their topics before pontificating. While some good points were made and interesting concepts brought up in each essay, the vast majority tended to fall into Marxist analysis. The further from the source each Marxist critique got, the more the essays started sounding like Rand worshipping objectivist critiques. “This person’s idea doesn’t work because Marx/Rand said so. Utopia will be achieved once class equality/completely unrestricted markets are instated.” It got to the point of being like eating sand, and I imagine several of the writers here would’ve been thoroughly annoying in conversation.
Anyway, on to Facebook.
I’ve decided to go relatively empirical here, citing way that I notice Facebook has impacted my own life more than extrapolating out in an abstract theoretical system. So how has Facebook changed how I live?
I find that events and happenings which were once reported by word of mouth and through a web of mutual acquaintances has been outsourced to the Facebook stream. Despite its multitude of options, this stream is in fact less efficient than the older system of word of mouth was. It used to be if I had a distant acquaintance, I would hear about it if something truly bizarre or interesting had happened to them, in a telling 2 or 3 steps removed from the source, and therefore made more lively through the invention/distortion of details and also filtered to only include the most awesome stories or important events. Facebook gives me these events in their most anemic and obtuse form almost immediately as they occur, and in a volume which far exceeds the volume of said information I honestly give a shit about. Also, in conversation, you run out of things to say fairly quickly, bringing up town gossip only to hear the extinguishing interjection of “Oh yeah, I read that on Facebook.” The story isn’t allowed any time to grow and the mythology of the group is hampered as a result.
Facebook also creates an immediate, unearned, and usually misleading intimacy with people who you’ve just met. Going through their Facebook, you might see an otherwise seemingly charming person write “Nickelback rocks cuz they have resl feeling in thier songs.” And try as you might, such a statement can’t help but lower your opinion of this person. Facebook paints an abstract and consistently unflattering portrait of its users; I once knew an otherwise interesting and agreeable fellow who had the misfortune of being portrayed on Facebook by way of three shaky cell-phone videos of himself screaming unintelligible things in a Hooters. How are people who don’t know him going to view this?
With no check on them, the most racist and misinformed commentaries which were once restricted to chain e-mails can now take an even greater foothold; communities can be organized without any outside influence by facts or sense. There is actually a Facebook group with 80,000 members called “I hate reading.” What better target could be put on these peoples’ backs to be manipulated into action by some corporate huckster or otherwise unprincipled opportunist?