Facebook

We've talked a lot about different ways to organize information in class. Most of it has been either private, personal information, or public information. We haven't talked too much about public personal information. How do we share information about ourselves with others online? Outside of the actual information about ourselves, what does how we share information say about us?

Here's some personal information that I'm making public: I don't get Facebook.

I assume that I don't have to explain what Facebook is, but for the sake of the assignment, let me give a quick synopsis. Facebook is a social networking site that allows users to share personal information with their friends and network(s). The site allows a user to list their favorite activities, interests, books, movies, tv shows, etc. This is problematic if you wish to portray yourself as someone who defines themselves in a format that isn't lists. I like lists, but lists are limiting. (On a side note, I was recently lamenting with a friend how it seems that the vast majority of the Web has become endless lists, and what that says about society in general. It is sad that the prevailing form of communication chosen by most netizens is one perfected by USA Today, but that is a gripe for another day. (For the sake of full disclosure, I should admit that it is perhaps more sad that I use the term "netizens." Again, as much as I could talk about that, this isn't the time or place.)) Much has been written about how this profile that one sets up is not unlike a dating profile: you want to have enough "high" art and healthy activities that you appear to be an intelligent person, but it is important to pepper the list with enough "low" art as well, to legitimize your street cred. The important thing is not coming off as a total ass, by listing only works like The Brothers Karamazov, The Mirror of Production, and Nights of Cabiria. But also, you don't want to look like the geekiest geek in all of geekdom either, by referencing JJ Abrams and Tarantino as your heroes. The trick here is balance. But already, we're forming a fake personality of ourselves for what we shall see is sadly real for more people than would like to admit it.

In addition to creating personas, Facebook allows friends to communicate with one another in a format different than blogging or email. For instance, there are pokes. In a nutshell, pokes allow users to acknowledge the existence of a friend by saying hello without the hassle of actually saying hello. There are other, slightly more creative ways to do this as well. For instance, you can send virtual flowers or throw a virtual chair at them. While amusing the first forty-seven or so times you send or receive these, it doesn't take too long to realize that, again, this isn't much of a way to communicate with people.

Recently, Facebook began to allow users to create widgets for users that "enhance" the Facebook experience. Almost all of them are quizzes. Which Greek philosopher are you? Which Anne Rice vampire are you? Which Peanuts character are you? and so on. Even (especially) when they're spot-on, they're sad.

But all of this is just the icing on the cake. The real meat of the site (if one will allow me to mix culinary metaphors) is in the actual communication betwixt friends. The kind where one actually writes words to pals. This is done on the Wall. The Wall is just a threaded series of emails, like Gmail, except public. Also, the wall posts are infinitely more difficult to search through than Gmail. Actually, everything is infinitely harder to search through. Facebook does a lousy job letting you search for particular phrases or threads you and your friends might have used while communicating.

Furthermore, the organization of content on one's Facebook page is crazy. There are a few things that are standard: profile, wall, friends. But then there are all the different widgets that allow you to personalize your page. And these widgets can go pretty much anywhere physically on the page, with the general result that it can be very difficult to navigate others' pages. Anyone who uses Facebook is going to think I'm more than a bit of a curmudgeon, but at the end of the day, the thing is clunky. Clunkier, at least, than what it could be.

My biggest gripe about Facebook, though, is the fact that it is a walled garden. Facebook is kind of like AOL in the old days: it had a closed system. You cannot share things that you create on Facebook with people who are not members of Facebook. There are no cross-platform widgets, no way to communicate with people outside of Facebook. There's no way to move your Myspace profile or friends list to Facebook. Which seems like a step backward from the Web 2.0, open-source, open-everything world that people saying we're moving toward. The site claims to have close to 70 million users, and is one of the biggest social networking sites in the world.

For a long time, my gripe was that everything you could do on Facebook, you could do better with email and a blog. I didn't get it, and I especially didn't get the fact that most Americans under 20 user Facebook much more than email. But now I think maybe I do get it. Facebook is a game. It's a game that makes the player appear interesting, and feel loved. And what that says about how we think about our own lives, is too much to even get started with here.