On Web Culture

Facebook feels like a moving target. It is difficult to criticise because I feel as though they might just bolt on Facebook for Charities or something and suddenly Facebook would be moving millions of dollars towards good causes. Pretty hard to criticise that. In fact I can vaguely recall when I read ‘The Facebook Effect’ there being some stuff in there about Facebook apps that do make it easier to donate or microfinance or something equally charitable.

But I have problems with Facebook. I aired them one evening with a group of friends and one friend was almost grievously disappointed at the disapproving tone of the rest of us. She seemed to be saying “Hey, I like this ok, stop hating on something I like”. Her opinion was it allowed her to connect with old friends, and also chat with all her friends. How could that be a bad thing?

Indeed. Facebook moves money towards good causes, it helps people to reconnect. What’s the big problem? Why don’t we just worry about more important things?

I remember once at a lunch calling Facebook “pervy” and got a good reaction so I said it again. Someone pointed out I’d just said “pervy” twice. “What, pervy?” Three times. But I think it is. I don’t know anyone that doesn’t enjoy a good insider’s look on Facebook of photos of friends-of-friends, or pics from so-and-so’s holiday. But I’ve never come away from that feeling anything but slightly slimy. I struggle to understand how behaviour like that is anything less that voyeuristic & competitive. If you ask me, that is a good reason to have lots of Facebook friends: for giving you access to more people’s lives.

Then there is another phenomenon: “Keeping in touch on Facebook”. This new social layer between “I don’t know you” and “Let’s keep in touch like adults do, as in, feature in each other’s lives”. I have had lots of folks tell me to keep in touch on Facebook and I have no idea what that means. What? Carry on a conversation that your uncle & your ex-girlfriend can read? I don’t know those people! It’s like talking with megaphones. Arguably the idea is I’m going to share things I’m up to & thus this Facebook Friend of mine can kind of just passively browse the things I’m up to when it suits them. That’s feels odd to me, why are we doing this? How are our lives better for it?

Facebook has introduced new social norms, new rules for dating, new rules for colleagues and is impacting modern society in lots of other places. It is ubiquitous. Just recently thousands of people in Palestine rallied themselves together via Facebook to call for more unity between the 2 leading Palestinian political groups. So you have a website that is still adding members, that is impacting – for all appearances – positive change. But down here on the ground, it is hard to see that. All I see is profile pictures of people posing as part of some public show-off I don’t feel part of. Hey, we don’t do this anywhere else in life, why is it cool here?

I think grassroots movements on Facebook spring up in spite of Facebook. I imagine a social web where radical movements and grassroots organisations are not reliant on the scale Facebook has which forces them to use Facebook.

A key to Facebook’s success, and where its lurking menace lies, is that most of us were forced to join it because everyone else was using it. There were conversations, news & invites you were missing out on if you weren’t “on Facebook”. Once there, suddenly you activated a public billboard of yourself you now have to maintain. It’s lock in. And the thing is, all those good things Facebook does, other websites already do better, or other websites could do better. Let’s just hope we transition to that instead of a future where the only internet some people know is Facebook.

Last week’s post was useful because I realised I was wrong. Sometimes you need to say something out loud to realise you actually don’t think that.

Last week I said I should be able to post in raw form and not be held accountable for the quality. My justification was that was the only way I was going publish more frequently. And that is just weak. No, I don’t think that. If you’re going to blog seriously online, then harden up. It is going to need to be thoughtful & polished otherwise it deserves any criticism it gets. And as for publishing more often, we’re not talking about a novel here – this is a blog. It shouldn’t be that hard to publish reasonably frequently.

I’m going overseas soon so it will be an interesting exercise to see if I can turn that into a reason to be updating more often.

Source: YouTube

A while ago now Stew said to me that the problem with blogging was that whatever you said, it was like it was your public statement, your official position now & forever. Stew & I had both been blogging for a while at that point & seen it grow in popularity. And it was true, the new environment was stifling, and not much fun. I also decided at the time that I, and Stew, were victims. It wasn’t fair!

I think my reaction then was because I just didn’t enjoy the scutiny. It made me have to sweat what I was writing and I wanted an escape route: “Oh, but it’s just a blog post!”. And today I don’t feel comfortable just banging out these sentences. I want it to be well-written. I’m aware of who is reading it, and also who might read it.

Probably just as long ago, when I suggested to my friend Joanna she start a blog, she said the internet probably wasn’t ready for controversial stuff she really would like say. That is certainly the case for me currently – I also blog behind pseudonyms & walled blog communities because there is stuff I just can’t say here. I do this because I feel the need to “self censor”. It might be that the content is only half thought out & needs a softer, friendlier audience. Or maybe it has such different content matter that the tone just isn’t suited to this particular blog. And sometimes I post elsewhere as part of getting it ready for posting here.

Strange, this world of blogging. I don’t like it very much. It doesn’t feel intimate and it also feels like work I’m not getting paid for. It feels easier to tweet something, because that does have an out. At least currently a tweet is like a remark, you do get away with more. And there are times where this blog would make more sense as a Tumblr website, where the content would be more video, and re-posts, and the sort of media heavy content sharing that Tumblr promotes.

But I don’t want to give up yet. I see two future paths. The easy option is to basically have a WordPress-powered Tumblr website. Or! Shout down the voices in my head, be brave and try to post what is on my head & heart to share. And the only way for the second option to work out is to publish in raw form. Anything too polished, too redacted will be too time-consuming and faced with that I don’t see my rate of publishing on this blog improving.

Do you know what happens when you blog in raw form? You get people pointing out your typos, pointing out how you contradict yourself with older posts, comments pointing out exceptions in ways that fail completely to usefully contribute to the conversation. It is awful. But maybe it is better than not blogging at all.