What do you think of Facebook?

[Buffalo Souljah]

I know different people react or think differently of various social phenomena; money, corporatism, violence--all of these things draw different judgments and pretensions from different people. What I am wondering in particular is what you make of the social networking phenomenon (in both senses) of the website Facebook. Do you believe it is a vibrant utility for connecting people of different social strata and enabling information to flow freely and quickly over vast distances? Do you believe it lowers the standards of what's out there for consumption by reducing the time and effort involved in relaying information? Do you think there are some elements which are useful for the purpose of social transformation and others harmful/conservative/reactionary? What do you make of this device? What does Facebook mean to you? Is it simply an ontology or does its interface necessarily extrapolate certain elements over others? I'm curious to know your judgments on this matter.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

This should be in Chit Chat.

[Buffalo Souljah]

This should be in Chit Chat.
We have a Chit chat section? How do I move it?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

A mod has to do this; one probably will soon.

[革命者]

I know different people react or think differently of various social phenomena; money, corporatism, violence--all of these things draw different judgments and pretensions from different people. What I am wondering in particular is what you make of the social networking phenomenon (in both senses) of the website Facebook. Do you believe it is a vibrant utility for connecting people of different social strata and enabling information to flow freely and quickly over vast distances? Do you believe it lowers the standards of what's out there for consumption by reducing the time and effort involved in relaying information? Do you think there are some elements which are useful for the purpose of social transformation and others harmful/conservative/reactionary? What do you make of this device? What does Facebook mean to you? Is it simply an ontology or does its interface necessarily extrapolate certain elements over others? I'm curious to know your judgments on this matter.Since you like Kierkegaard I guess you agree with the last stance you speak of?

I have to say I agree with that. But it's the Internet that has led to this, not just social networks. Social networks particularly lead to the potential (though pretty inherent) danger of stigmatisation by association, or by some personal info you share with others. And nothing is deleted any time soon (as on RevLeft, too), not even if you ask Facebook to.

The biggest problem I have with Facebook is that its owned by a new elite who are out-spoken libertarians who stigmatise everybody that sees problems caused by new technology as Neo-Luddites, which they obviously frame as the new great evil, like people did with Communism before and after WW2.

The mantra is that change means progress, and it's always purely and always good and the consequences are too.

[Le Libérer]

Moved to chitchat.

[革命者]

Chit-chat is the death of serious threads.

[Tyrlop]

i think Facebook sucks, the guys owning it could just sell all your information to CIA or whatever. But i have some future plans for it. hehe :sneaky:

[Revy]

there's some picture earlier I saw of graffiti that said "Facebook is the opium of the masses".
Seems accurate. I have a profile - but I rarely use it.
I find the lack of privacy that one has on there disturbing. I had to tinker around with the settings just to get it to have enough privacy and there still wasn't enough.

[gorillafuck]

I have a profile and I check it a lot.

[革命者]

i think Facebook sucks, the guys owning it could just sell all your information to CIA or whatever. But i have some future plans for it. hehe :sneaky:For all you know they are the CIA. They are at least part of the Capitalist Interest Alliance. Not unknowing accomplices, but full proponents of capitalism.

[Bilan]

Useful.

[Sean]

Sorry, but we have a perfectly good websites forum that this could have gone into. Its a serious topic, could we move there please?

[革命者]

Sorry, but we have a perfectly good websites forum that this could have gone into. Its a serious topic, could we move there please?Yes, Websites is a good place for it. More time to think before you post when it stays on the first page for longer than just a few days.

[Sean]

If the forum is neglected and you'd rather a steady stream of content, why not go wank off on 4chan old chap? :)
I'm not wasting a good rant and code here. You're right about the other forum.

[MarxSchmarx]

This is a logical place for this thread.

BTW, Sorry grandma. I think this pretty much says it:
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/07/31/106-facebook/

After I "friended" my (nonwhite) grandmother, I disabled my account.

[rednordman]

i think Facebook sucks, the guys owning it could just sell all your information to CIA or whatever. But i have some future plans for it. hehe :sneaky:Technically speaking, this could actually work to our advantage. You see, so long as you do not mention your political persuasion, it could be very easy to mislead people about who you actually are. My profile simply has pictures of me particiapating in sporting events, but that doesnt totally represent me as a person. What it does do however, is put forward a image that im a genuine 'good egg' (to any government authority), especially when I have all my familiy members as friends.

[AK]

I spend far too much time on Facebook as it is. I'd say I'm addicted.

[RedRise]

I don't even see the point in facebook. It's just for attention-craving people who think that they need to put their entire life on display to get their attention hit and feel popular because they have lots of 'friends'.:rolleyes: What the hell is wrong with email?:confused:

[革命者]

Technically speaking, this could actually work to our advantage. You see, so long as you do not mention your political persuasion, it could be very easy to mislead people about who you actually are. My profile simply has pictures of me particiapating in sporting events, but that doesnt totally represent me as a person. What it does do however, is put forward a image that im a genuine 'good egg' (to any government authority), especially when I have all my familiy members as friends.It will cause an information overload at th side of the intelligence services when they have too much information to handle. Especially if most people that use Facebook are naive, happy accomplices in capitalism.

And Twitter will draw away the attention of more underground efforts to change goverment.

Email with good encryption can go a long way, but is not very popular; infomation only once has to be transmitted without encryption for to it to leak. Most people reply to e-mail by including the message they're responding to. Legal action can be used to prevent that, but not if you want to overtrow goverment.:)

[*Viva La Revolucion*]

Facebook is useful for a number of reasons: it can be used to find old friends, it makes it easy to connect with people, it's particularly helpful for maintaining long distance friendships.

There are a multitude of ways to do the above things, however, so what makes Facebook special? I suppose there's the advantage of having all of your friends in one place. It also makes maintaining friendships you wouldn't otherwise bother with easier - laziness definitely plays a part. But I think a lot of it is to do with psychology.

It's possible that being able to see the number of ''friends'' you have helps (or damages) self-esteem by making you feel popular/unpopular. Perhaps a negative aspect is that it turns socializing (something fun and essential) into a competition; people ''collect'' friends as though they're commodities. It also gives people a lot more control over their image - they can choose the groups they join, they can share only the best photographs of themselves etc. Often it seems as though people can't go anywhere without telling all of their friends on Facebook about it; sometimes I even wonder whether people go to parties just so that they'll have something good to put online.

[ckaihatsu]

Perhaps a negative aspect is that it turns socializing (something fun and essential) into a competition; people ''collect'' friends as though they're commodities.


I was telling someone over the weekend that I'm kinda *stunned* at how the mainstream has now *out-geeked* me -- my origins with computers go back to the early '80s, when computer use was akin to being an electronics hobbyist or something.

Now *I* find the *mainstream* to be *too geeky* in using online acquaintance-collecting sites like (Friendster), MySpace, and now Facebook. Email is certainly sufficient and is hardly any more difficult to use, organization-wise, than a site-based system of contacts.

I was actually *thrilled* to find CouchSurfing a couple of years ago because it *blends* the online and offline worlds in the best way possible. I *don't* want a group of people who only exist in cyberspace -- I want to *hang out* with people *and* have the web serve as an organizational backbone for all of it....


Chris



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[Chambered Word]

It's possible that being able to see the number of ''friends'' you have helps (or damages) self-esteem by making you feel popular/unpopular.

You'd have to be pretty damn shallow to feel bad about not having 200+ Facebook friends. :lol:

[(A)narcho-Matt]

I think I fell into the trap of thinking it is possible to use FB for meaningful activism. My campus free education network tried to organise a demo over fees, we had over 100 people confirm they were going on FB then only 25 people turned up. (which was still okish for the first actual activist event on campus.(although the universities labour students have a more insurectionary history of burning embassys...))

[*Viva La Revolucion*]

You'd have to be pretty damn shallow to feel bad about not having 200+ Facebook friends. :lol:

:D

I can't see how anyone could have 200 real friends, anyway. I know someone who has about 500 friends on Facebook and I keep thinking, ''they're not friends, they're just people you've met''.

But I still think it matters to some people, unfortunately.

[Sarah Palin]

I feel that facebook is an effective means of communication when (usually) I can't get to a phone or what have you. I go to school about 200 miles from home, but with facebook I've been able to stay in touch with most everybody I want to from my hometown.

[Sleeper]

I think that I was doing a search for an old friend of mine I wanted to get in touch with, and somehow ended up on a Facebook link. I hit the, "Back," button on the browser and that is the only time I've ever been to Facebook.

[ckaihatsu]

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/07/31/106-facebook/



Besides the ever-important and revealing *cultural* critique (at the link above), I think we should go ahead here and do the "official" Marxist materialist critique....





It's possible that being able to see the number of ''friends'' you have helps (or damages) self-esteem by making you feel popular/unpopular.


Facebook, as a bourgeois institution, reinforces the *infantilization* of the working class public through psychological warfare -- it seeks to *regress* us to our earlier stages of life when we were probably more vulnerable to peer pressure and socialized attitudes in the forced-attendance institution of school.

The name 'facebook' itself is, of course, recollective of a high school yearbook, hearkening us back to a time in which we may have been more likely to be in a mode of "collecting" (and/or making) friends, as with a yearbook or signature book. This activity, if taken to the lengths of being a *pursuit*, would then be accompanied by its flipside, the *anxiety* of *not* being "successful" at making friends.

In tying us to a pursuit of "friending" online we are encouraged to indeed inter-commodify each other, reducing our respective depths of personalities into the equivalents of cardboard baseball trading cards.

While one could argue the sunnier side that the 'Facebook' name is trivial and that, in function, the networking site creates an active, dynamic version of the white pages phone book, it can't be ignored that the *most* empowering online networking function -- email's 'reply all' button (enabling a cascading many-to-many topology) -- is *not* a fundamental function of social networking sites.

[The Red Next Door]

useful i get contact with comrades.

[ckaihatsu]

Forgot to add that Facebook's sleek, innocent cutting-edge technological interface actually intrudes with the bony hand of *nostalgia* in yet-another marketed form, always ready to drain one's momentum on the hamster wheel of yesteryear fantasies.

[LOLseph Stalin]

I like facebook. As a comrade who is politically isolated, it helps me to keep in contact with other comrades and get updates and such. I even have contacts in Gaza I can get updates from. Also, it's easier to plan stuff with my real life friends.

[CELMX]

I'm banned from facebook by my fascist parents. :(

[The Idler]

Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind the funding, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly thought out ideology that they are hoping to spread around the world. Facebook is one manifestation of this ideology. Like PayPal before it, it is a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative libertarianism.

...

Although the project was initially conceived by media cover star Mark Zuckerberg, the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel.

He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the "multiculture" led to a lessening of individual freedoms. While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a rightwing journal, still up and running, called The Stanford Review - motto: Fiat Lux ("Let there be light"). Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the web. Thiel calls himself "way libertarian".TheVanguard is run by one Rod D Martin, a philosopher-capitalist whom Thiel greatly admires. On the site, Thiel says: "Rod is one of our nation's leading minds in the creation of new and needed ideas for public policy. He possesses a more complete understanding of America than most executives have of their own businesses."
This little taster from their website will give you an idea of their vision for the world: "TheVanguard.Org is an online community of Americans who believe in conservative values, the free market and limited government as the best means to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone, especially the poorest among us." Their aim is to promote policies that will "reshape America and the globe". TheVanguard describes its politics as "Reaganite/Thatcherite". The chairman's message says: "Today we'll teach MoveOn [the liberal website], Hillary and the leftwing media some lessons they never imagined."

...With friends like these ... (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook)

[Davie zepeda]

I've alway's wonder why we haven't made an alternate to face book uniting left and progressive thinkers to a network friendly to us and not our enemies?
I mean it's simple easy and can actually get us some money for a real movement i mean if we had the power like face book ceo's we could pay for buses and tickets for protest, exchange programs, actually meeting members of real armed struggles and even influence local elections. Basically the black panther party but with money yah feel me!

[ckaihatsu]

I've alway's wonder why we haven't made an alternate to face book uniting left and progressive thinkers to a network friendly to us and not our enemies?


Uh, yeah -- it's called * RevLeft *

[GPDP]

I've alway's wonder why we haven't made an alternate to face book uniting left and progressive thinkers to a network friendly to us and not our enemies?
I mean it's simple easy and can actually get us some money for a real movement i mean if we had the power like face book ceo's we could pay for buses and tickets for protest, exchange programs, actually meeting members of real armed struggles and even influence local elections. Basically the black panther party but with money yah feel me!

The folks over at ZNet have been trying to create a leftist alternative to Facebook. They call it ZSpace.

[Davie zepeda]

It's called making a publicly owned corporation that brings us revenue for the masses instead of whining about the limited resources we have!!!
I said alternative not blog or forum a social networking site

[ckaihatsu]

It's called making a publicly owned corporation that brings us revenue for the masses instead of whining about the limited resources we have!!!
I said alternative not blog or forum a social networking site


Jesus, Dave, with all due respect, the online organizational thing ended (began), arguably, once everyone got on AOL email back in '97 (that the Internet became a mainstream thing).

As far as I'm concerned all we need, technologically speaking, is RevLeft -- all the rest is bells and whistles. Do you *want* to dip your toe into the business side of things and create a new *social phenomenon* for the revolutionary left that could generate revenue?

We could call it a new shoot of growth, at best, or, at worst, a fad -- or we could just use RevLeft and get more newbie revolutionaries up to speed quickly and build more of an overall proletariat consciousness generally...(!)

[The Idler]

I've alway's wonder why we haven't made an alternate to face book uniting left and progressive thinkers to a network friendly to us and not our enemies?
I mean it's simple easy and can actually get us some money for a real movement i mean if we had the power like face book ceo's we could pay for buses and tickets for protest, exchange programs, actually meeting members of real armed struggles and even influence local elections. Basically the black panther party but with money yah feel me!
It makes it easier for enemies to persecute us.

[mikelepore]

There are many socialist, Marxist, etc. groups on Facebook, and also many issue-oriented groups where a leftist viewpoint can be injected, e.g., environmentalism, civil rights, etc.. Anyone interested should just type a keyword into the Facebook search box. Any communication medium where you can speak your mind, and have it go out to hundreds or thousands of people, should be considered as possibly useful.

The main problem I have with Facebook is you really have to choose just one thing that your "wall" will look like for everyone. Some people optimize it for communication with relatives and old classmates, other people optimize it to advertise their politial views, and I find that I can't easily do both at the same time.

[MolotovLuv]

Anyone who uses Facebook should be aware of the security (or lack thereof) of the website. Everything is saved and can be accessed by Facebook employees. Anybody that uses that site should read this interview of an anonymous Facebook worker who talks about this. I have a facebook profile just to keep in touch with friends who use it but I think twice before I posted anything that could be used against me in any way.

http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-internet-5-anonymous-facebook-employee/?full=yes

[A.R.Amistad]

I find it a useful activism and recruiting tool for organizing.

[革命者]

I find it a useful activism and recruiting tool for organizing.But aren't there better alternatives? What makes e-mail not sufficient, for example? Do you think the lack of privacy is a problem or a inevitable consequence of a good platform to organise or recruit?

[Pawn Power]

Aside from the "security" issues, facebook is a brilliant resource for advertisers.