Another silly season musing: Ros Taylor has written a rather laboured Op-Ed for Comment is Free. She argues, slightly convincingly, that the closed nature of facebook’s UI, provides a set of social rules that hark back to those of Elizabethan Courtship.
In truth, Facebook has conventions every bit as rigid as those of the Elizabethan court or the 18th century salon. The site offers friends a limited range of social interactions - gift-giving, joining groups, writing on friends’ walls - and enforces them strictly. The social codes are as non-negotiable as anything in Austen. Offenders are threatened with exclusion. A range of conversational topics such as photo albums, bookshelves and Scrabble are imported from the real world for mutual entertainment. And then there is poking.
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Facebook friendship is a little like the medieval convention of courtly love, and has about as much in common with the outside world. The strict codes and flirtatious little transgressions are partly a reaction to the anonymous heckling that blogging made possible. But mostly Facebook does what sophisticated, privileged societies do: they codify the ways in which humans can play out their friendships. Don’t knock it. We’ve been doing it for thousands of years.
I must admit that many professionals, who usually steer clear of the increasingly vicious blogosphere, do feel at ease on facebook. And one of the main attractions of facebook, over say the mindless MySpace, is that users can maintain a great deal of control over who can view their profile and interact with them. But I also feel that Taylor is inching herself across a very thin analogy here. Haven’t journos got anything better to write about?
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Naturally. But wouldn’t you say a website on which millions of individuals are tempted to spend many millions of hours is worth a bit of analysis? The media’s always on about Facebook, but I don’t think enough attention has been paid to exactly why it’s so popular…
Hi Ros, thanks for dropping by. Yeah, I’m a member of facebook, and yeah, it’s a phenomenon (etc.) and the media never shuts up about it…
And, if I’m honest, I actually feel for you guys at this time of year. I have nothing to write about so I don’t blog; you, I guess, don’t have that choice.
The irony is, on this ‘worthless’ subject, I actually commented myself. The blogosphere has come to something when it’s feeding of the MSM’s silly season output, eh?
Blogs writing about blogs writing about Facebook … it’s so meta! But seriously, there’ll be dozens of academic theses written about it - whether that’s a good thing or not. I’m just dipping in a toe.
Ah yes. Meta. Quite.
I’d leave the boring stuff to the academics, Ros. Can’t you go and have another poke at the rotting carcass of Dave Cameron’s Tory revival, Eh?
Don’t worry. Writing that on Monday.