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A few days ago over at Text Patterns, Alan Jacobs offered this interesting excerpt from an article by Jed Perl:
“Writing, before it is anything else, is a way of clarifying one’s thoughts. This is obviously true of forms such as the diary, which are inherently solitary. But even those of us who write for publication can conclude, once we have clarified certain thoughts, that these thoughts are not especially valuable, or are not entirely convincing, or perhaps are simply not thoughts we want to share with others, at least not now. For many of us who love the act of writing — even when we are writing against a deadline with an editor waiting for the copy — there is something monastic about the process, a confrontation with one’s thoughts that has a value apart from the proximity or even perhaps the desirability of any other reader. I believe that most writing worth reading is the product, at least to some degree, of this extraordinarily intimate confrontation between the disorderly impressions in the writer’s mind and the more or less orderly procession of words that the writer manages to produce on the page. . . .
I am not saying that writers need to be or ought to be isolated, either from other writers or from the reading public at large. But writers must to some degree believe that they are alone with their own words. And writers who are alone with their words will quite naturally, from time to time, conclude that some of those words should remain private. This needs to be emphasized right now, when so few people in the publishing industry understand why anything that has been written, and especially written by a well-known author, should not be published, and not published with the widest possible readership in mind.
. . . What I fear is that many readers are coming to believe that a writer who holds something back from publication is somehow acting unnaturally. Nobody understands the extent to which, even for the widely acclaimed author with ready access to publication, the process of writing can sometimes necessitate a rejection or at least an avoidance of one’s own readers. That silence is a part of writing — that the work of this day or this week or even this year might for good reason be withheld — is becoming harder and harder to comprehend.”
Mr. Jacobs added: “The dominance in our culture of social networking, especially but not only Facebook, intensifies this problematic situation. Shyness and introversion, as a search for either of those words on Amazon.com will show you, are regularly seen as pathologies; Eric Schmidt thinks that if you don’t want Google to know everything about you you must have something discreditable to hide; Mark Zuckerberg believes, or says he believes, that the exposure of your life on Facebook promotes honesty and integrity. Clearly there are people who would like to see a social stigma attached to a concern for privacy: will they succeed in making it happen?”
Good question.
(Source: http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/)
The times, they are a’ changin’, as Mr. Dylan noted not so very long ago. Speaking of Dylan, I simply must share with you a portion of a May article by Nicholas Carr. You may think his example a stretch of the imagination, but I am not so sure. It’s a strange world I was born into. First Mr. Carr quotes a Dylan lyric: “You’re invisible now, you’ve got no secrets to conceal.” Then he quotes a particularly stupid remark of Mark Zuckerberg: “You have one identity … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha! I cackle like the Wicked Witch of the West at that gem of a remark from the founder of Facebook, that social networking site where everyone’s online profile is a sterling replica of their dear true self… NOT. Anyhow, I will let Mr. Carr speak for himself about that quote:
This is, at the obvious level, a clever and cynical ploy to recast the debate about Facebook’s ongoing efforts to chip away at its members’ privacy safeguards. Facebook, Zuckerberg implies, isn’t compromising your privacy by selling personal data to corporations; it is making you a better person. By forcing you, through its imposition of what it calls “radical transparency,” to have “one identity,” it is also imposing integrity on you. We should all be grateful that we have Zuck to act as our personal character trainer, I guess.
Zuckerberg’s self-servingly cavalier attitude toward other people’s privacy has provoked a firestorm of criticism over the last couple of weeks. Whether or not a critical mass of Facebook members actually care enough about online privacy to force Facebook to fundamentally shift its policies remains to be seen. Up to now, as I’ve pointed out in the past, Facebook’s strategy for turning identity into a commodity has consisted of taking two steps forward and then, when confronted with public resistance, apologizing profusely before taking one step back. I suspect that’s what will happen again – and again, and again.
But that’s not the subject of this post. Zuckerberg’s “one identity” proclamation reminded me of something I heard Jaron Lanier say in a recent lecture. He was talking about the way that Facebook, and other social networking sites, serves as a permanent public record of our lives. That’s great in a lot of ways – it gives us new ways to express ourselves, socialize, cement and maintain friendships. But there’s a dark side, too. Lanier pointed to the example of Bob Dylan. After growing up, as Robert Zimmerman, in Hibbing, Minnesota, Dylan shucked off his youthful identity, like a caterpillar in a chrysalis, and turned himself into the mysterious young troubador Bob Dylan in New York City. It was a great act of self-reinvention, a necessary first step in a career of enormous artistic achievement. Indeed, it’s impossible to imagine the kid Zimmerman becoming the artist Dylan without that clean break from the past, without, as Zuckerberg would see it, the exercise of a profound lack of “integrity.”
Imagine, Lanier said, a young Zimmerman trying to turn himself into Dylan today. Forget it. He would be trailing his online identity – his “one identity” – all the way from Hibbing to Manhattan. “There’s that goofy Zimmerman kid from Minnesota,” would be the recurring word on the street in Greenwich Village. The caterpillar Zimmerman, locked into his early identity by myriad indelible photos, messages, profiles, friends, and “likes” plastered across the Web, would remain the caterpillar Zimmerman. Forever.
More insidious than Facebook’s data lock-in is its identity lock-in. The invisibility that Dylan describes at the end of “Like a Rolling Stone,” where you’re free of your secrets, of your past life, is a necessary precondition for personal reinvention. As Robert Zimmerman traveled from Hibbing to New York, he first became invisible – and then he became Bob Dylan. In the future, such acts of transformation may well become impossible. Facebook saddles the young with what Zuckerberg calls “one identity.” You can never escape your past. The frontier of invisibility is replaced by the cage of transparency.
(Source: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/05/facebooks_ident.php)
Today, Facebook has over 500 million users. Not having it is compared to not having Microsoft Word. You Radical, you! This is what Facebookers cry about us. They think we are Radicals, with a big R. But we are not. We are not phony self-named Reformers, pointing fingers at a particular thing because we want attention. Nay, we are sane individuals who hate oppression and love the beauty of living. We are the sane ones, and we shall remain sane if the rest of the world falls off the edge or not. No matter how many or few of us there are, we will be the sane ones who have kept our heads. Far be it from me to say “ah shucks, might as well ditch my principles too and enjoy the flow of the current.” Nay indeed. I think of that significant man, Winston Churchill, and one of the many memorable things he said:
“Never give in. Never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
I, S. J. Buckner, concur. And I will continue concurring and persist in my refusal to succumb to Facebook and other oppressive things as long as I keep my head. Which I hope will be for a long time. And if we don’t have any Bob Dylans in the future, we can attribute the fact to Facebook.
First off, the silence on this end can be explained by the fact that the computer I do most of my work on crashed on Wednesday. Done for. Vanquished. Slaughtered. So, I was liberated from the machine for a couple of days. Except for the stress of knowing that data and such had to be retrieved, I had a peachy time ignoring the existence of the web for a day or two. Sometimes I do think I could be a hermit. Of course, every several hours I would sit down at the desk and put my hand to the mouse before the dead screen recalled me to my computerless situation. And the dead screen gave me a thrill of joy every time. It was swell while it lasted but now I’ve been recaptured by this technological age of (scoff, sneer, snicker) “progress.” Anyhow, I am truly sorry if I have missed any comments or questions from my lovely readers.
Now, this is fascinating stuff. Here is a representation by Matt McKeon showing how much of your Facebook information is public if you use the default settings, as of April 2010 (Click to enlarge):
Somebody’s getting greedy. The neat thing is that Mr. McKeon (a Facebooker himself; he actually likes the thing) has also made graphs showing how much of your information was public (according to default) in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009. Start with the first year and watch Facebook grab more and more privacy away from its unsuspecting followers.
Mr. McKeon is frank about the fact that he is still in the process of revising his chart and keeping it up-to-date. He is certainly not biased against Facebook and appears to have done a fine job of fairly interpreting the data. In fact, he sounds like a nice fellow; I wish he would quit Facebook. Yet he does not seem to have any such plans. Still, he admits:
“Over the past couple of years, the default privacy settings for a Facebook user’s personal information have become more and more permissive. They’ve also changed how your personal information is classified several times, sometimes in a manner that has been confusing for their users. This has largely been part of Facebook’s effort to correlate, publish, and monetize their social graph: a massive database of entities and links that covers everything from where you live to the movies you like and the people you trust.”
Mr. McKean thinks the remedy to this distressing problem is just to be aware and change the default privacy settings. Not to bust his cheerfulness bubble, but a rather interesting Daily Finance article I read yesterday morning points out that Facebook, along with MySpace, has sent data “to online ad giants that could be used to identify a user’s name, age, hometown, and occupation regardless of their privacy settings.” (My emphasis added.)
Okay, here are some other items worthy of note:
1) The time was ripe so Sam Gustin of Daily Finance gave Mark Zuckerberg a friendly warning earlier this month: “Mark my words, Mark,” spoke Sam. ”You continue down this path, and you’ll destroy the company. Things can change very quickly on the internet and you’d better get your hubris in check before you face the same fate as Xerxes.” Nice one, Mr. Gustin!
2) You really should read “those pathetic youngsters” which Alan Jacobs posted in April. Brief but telling.
3) In case you were wondering, I really am going to get back to work on those other 99 Household Items With More Value than Facebook. Soon.
Well, congrats if you made it to the end of my rambling. I was also going to mention the upcoming Quit Facebook Day you have probably heard about, but I’ll have to save that for later.
Signing off,
S. J. Buckner
Christine Rosen makes a good point here in an article entitled “Awe and the Machine.” I do find it lamentable that most of us understand very, very little about the science at work behind our technological innovations. More significantly, it is regrettable that people are so ready to sacrifice direct experience for virtual reality. At the end of the day, virtual experience is only so fulfilling to the human soul. It is real people, places, and experiences that affect on a much more profound level. Emphasis is my own:
“In the early age of machines, they inspired awe by proving capable of doing what man could never do alone (such as power an entire factory), or what we once believed only man could do (play chess). Now we expect our machines to do just about everything for us, from organizing our finances to writing our grocery lists. Our machines not only ease the mundane burdens of daily life (cooking, cleaning, working), but also serve, increasingly, as both our primary source of entertainment and the means for maintaining intimate relationships with others. Henry Adams’s dynamo has been replaced by Everyman’s iPod, and awe has given way to complacence and dependence. Your computer’s e-mail program doesn’t inspire awe; it is more like a dishwasher than a dynamo. Nineteenth-century rhapsodies to the machines that tamed nature, such as the steam engine, have given way to impatience with the machines that don’t immediately indulge our whims. The decline in humility toward our machines comes at a time when we know almost nothing about how or why they work. Although overwhelmed by its power, Henry Adams nevertheless had a basic understanding of how the dynamo operated. Most of us know very little about how our laptop computers run or how to repair our washing machines. Today we are less likely to feel awe in the presence of our machines than we are to experience what historian Jacques Barzun called “machine-made helplessness.” This, too, is a form of blind faith, like the people who, devotedly following the instructions of their car’s GPS device, drive right off a hill, all the while certain that this must be impossible — how could their perfectly calibrated machine be wrong? The awe experienced by earlier generations was part of a different worldview, one that demonstrated greater humility about many things, not least of which concerned their own human limits and frailties. Today we believe our machines allow us to know a lot more, and in many ways they do. What we don’t want to admit — but should — is that they also ensure that we directly experience less. Updating your Facebook page is a lot easier than venturing out into the world to confront a dynamo, as Adams did. But it is also, in the end, likely to be a lot less awe-inspiring.”
(Source: http://incharacter.org/features/awe-and-the-machine/)
“Modern societies must decide what their loves truly are — or else technology itself will entrap them in what is merely feasible.”
— Michael Novak, Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove
P.S. For those who have asked about anti-Facebook shirts, research is underway!
So Dr. Boli [http://drboli.wordpress.com] is at it again with his sometimes bizarre, sometimes comic, and sometimes delightfully pointed sense of fun. Are the following advertisements from his Celebrated Magazine poking fun at our pretty much illiterate generation? Just maybe.
- “The Blandville Branch Library will offer a one-hour talk entitled “What Is a Book?” on Saturday, May 2, at 1 p.m. The audience will have the opportunity to see and handle several books after the talk.”
- “THE BLANDVILLE BRANCH Library will be having a Giant Book Sale beginning Monday and continuing until all the books are gone. The Library staff have decided that the Library can no longer afford to maintain a collection of books when computer workstations are so expensive.”
- “The Community Television Viewers’ Association will be offering a free workshop all day Tuesday. With the Internet rapidly overtaking television in popularity, we are concerned that the skills required to absorb purely passive entertainment are being lost. Third-generation television viewers will be on hand to teach you the secrets to a rewardingly inert television-viewing experience. “
One reader funnily commented about the last two announcements, ”I fear that you may have inadvertently posted real news in the [above] paragraphs. Please try harder at parody and satire in the future.”
The Bottom Line: People do not read anymore; instead, they spend time on distracting social networking sites like Facebook. This has disastrous effects on personal lives. This will have a disastrous effect on culture at large. If reading continues to decrease and writing to deteriorate, we shall all soon be certifiable barbarians. Which somehow doesn’t appeal to me.
Conversation (and here I mean real, live, face-to-face conversation) is officially a Lost Art. Facebook deserves at least an honorable mention in the subtle slaughter of true conversation. For the record, I loathe (yes, loathe) the modern habit of ignoring the person right next to oneself while texting rapidly, playing an inane game on the phone, or skimming Facebook.
“Without the habit of conversation in homes, schools, and social occasions, the memorable reality of people, the sheer enjoyment of the play of speech, the liveliness of the truth, and the medicine of common sense leave the realm of ordinary experience and become the vestiges of an ancient past, and the whole quality of life becomes reduced to the banal and pathetic.” -The Lost Arts of Modern Civilization, by Mitchell Kalpakgian
I just skimmed an article from the “Australian Humanities Review” (don’t ask me how I found it, the Internet is a strange tool indeed) by one Meaghan Morris. She treats the subject of Facebook and one part of her article notes the phenomenon of “instrumental or desperate friend-accumulation” and the existence of ”Addicted to Facebook” groups on the site itself. Apparently, one member of such a group penned this poem, what Morris generously called a “well-turned, 14 stanza ballad.” I just had to post this poem, sweetly entitled ‘Can I be your Facebook Friend?’:
“Can I be your Facebook Friend?
Friendship’s new reality
And we’ll celebrate our union
For all cyberspace to see
Can I be your Facebook Friend?
Cause this friendship is unique
We can hold a conversation
And we never have to speak
If you add me as your friend
I’ll accept of course, and then
I will sit here on your profile
You won’t hear from me again”
You have to love the irony of it. Morris says: “This poem nicely catches the nuances of the ‘Facebook addict’ type: an anti-social, agoraphobic, ‘low maintenance’ lurker who is also a passive-aggressive and voyeuristic stalker accumulating useless social capital.” Ha, ha. A fun sentence which just might make my list of favorite anti-Facebook quotes. Two final words. One, do not bother reading Morris’ article. She is a Facebooker herself and, on the whole, she irked me. Second, I realize that not everyone who uses Facebook is an addict. But I do think that most individuals who claim that “I really don’t spend much time on Facebook!” would have a hard time quitting it for good.
Good readers beware! I have a feeling that the above poem will tempt me to try my own hand at AntiFacebook verse in the near future!
You can say that you have Facebook to stay in touch with your friends. But like it or not, you won’t be able to have a private conversation. Facebook is public. Even if you don’t mean it to happen, your personal information will be used by marketers, researchers, and government agencies. Is it worth it? Why shout out to the whole world what you want to say to one person? Wouldn’t a letter be more efficient?
Following are parts of an article written in 2006 and entitled The Privacy Paradox: Social Networking in the United States. The author is Susan B. Barnes, a Professor in the Department of Communication at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).
Last September, Rupert Murdoch purchased MySpace from Intermix for a reported $580 million cash buyout. Currently, “Murdoch is getting: a gold mine of market research, a microscope into the content habits and brand choices of America’s capricious youth market — not to mention millions of potential new customers for News Corp.’s Fox subsidiaries.” Similarly, Christine Rosen, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, observed that some of the discussion groups on Facebook look like mailing lists. The same names of discussion groups are also the names used in marketing directories. The commercial aspect of the site is quite apparent.
In America, we live in a paradoxical world of privacy. On one hand, teenagers reveal their intimate thoughts and behaviors online and, on the other hand, government agencies and marketers are collecting personal data about us.
Internet software can be used as parasocietal mechanisms for the observation of online interactions. Online social networks allow for high levels of surveillance.
Social networking sites create a central repository of personal information. These archives are persistent and cumulative . Instead of replacing old information with new materials, online journals are archive–oriented compilations of entries that can be searched.
Tracy Mitrano (2006), Director of IT Policy and Computer Policy and Law Program at Cornell University, created an introduction to Facebook for college students. She warns “on Facebook, you have absolutely no expectation of privacy.”
