Copyright ©1997-2009 Glenn Fleishman except as noted otherwise. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint, contact Glenn Fleishman at glenn at glennf.com. Photo © 2008 Laurence Chen; used with permission.
Copyright ©1997-2009 Glenn Fleishman except as noted otherwise. All rights reserved. For permission to reprint, contact Glenn Fleishman at glenn at glennf.com. Photo © 2008 Laurence Chen; used with permission.
Turning technology from mumbo-jumbo into rich tasty gumbo
< Regular Life | Main | Worst Days and Better Days >The scuttlebutt is that social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are killing blogs, because people who can tweet in 140 characters or post status updates and photos quite easily on Facebook have little reason to write short or extended posts on their own sites.
Like me.
Might be true.
The transition, though, is from a public space in which a blog--even when it's hosted by another party--turns into "social-media content" hosted in a particular form which can't be transitioned easily elsewhere. If you give up on Facebook or decide their rules are too strict about what you can post (nude photos of yourself? extended curses? political fantasies that involves assassination? or just speech that falls afoul of political correctness?), how do you move your Facebook life elsewhere?
You can't.
As I posted (on Twitter, natch):
Free speech : restricted speech ::
Blog : Facebook/Twitter ::
Public forum/agora : a mall
That's not to blame FB or Twitter for their policies or business aims. Rather, just as free speech is eroded when the public space is diminished--think of where people gather in towns, and whether speech is allowed even when it should be protected--so, too, does a migration to proprietary corporate-controlled fora reduce the ability for unfettered personal expression.
Posted by Glennf at July 16, 2009 12:25 PM
It's the television of the Internet! Sucking people's creative impulses into boring behavior.
Posted by: Glenn Fleishman at July 20, 2009 11:35 AM
to me the real insult of facebook is that is inferior in so many ways to more traditional online communities. facebook is nearly everyone you know grazing on the finite grasses of your attention. good online communities have norms, discipline, hazing, initiation, shared history, moderation, friction, boundary testing. on facebook most contributions are ignored monologues and stupid quizzes and games stand in for the real dialogue that occurs in human scale social networks (the well, metafilter, fp, old usenet communities, etc).
what i loathe about facebook is that it hoards the attention of so many and lacks the ambition/altruism/vision to make it as transformative as many of us know online social interaction can be. it diffuses our individual attempts to connect into a wall of noise, more a circle jerk of distraction or fishing for any trite pingback from the void.
i do enjoy having some ambient awareness of what old friends are up to and look forward to some future, better opensocial version of this where my friends will have to do more than push stupid games at each other to gain my attention. friendfeed is certainly a better alternative.
Posted by: t o n x at July 20, 2009 10:25 AM
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