Friday, February 05, 2010

In the World of Facebook - The New York Review of Books

When I’m done meditating about Steve Gillmor’s take on MLP, I’m going dedicate some time and attention to this New York Review of Books essay about Facebook and MySpace.

What is "social networking"? For all the vagueness of the term, which now seems to encompass everything we do with other people online, it is usually associated with three basic activities: the creation of a personal Web page, or "profile," that will serve as a surrogate home for the self; a trip to a kind of virtual agora, where, along with amusedly studying passersby, you can take a stroll through the ghost town of acquaintanceships past, looking up every person who's crossed your path and whose name you can remember; and finally, a chance to remove the digital barrier and reveal yourself to the unsuspecting subjects of your gaze by, as we have learned to put it with the Internet's peculiar eagerness for deforming our language, "friending" them, i.e., requesting that you be connected online in some way.

In the World of Facebook - The New York Review of Books

1 comment:

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