About Facebook (reposted from my blog)

So, let me start off by saying that I'm not a big fan of Facebook, and I'll tell you why. But first let me acknowledge that the opinions expressed here are my own, and not those of the management of Blog Time Passing...

...wait a minute, wait a minute... I am the management of Blog Time Passing, so this is, in fact, the official position of this blog. But I do recognize that my opinion may not be your opinion, nor am I trying to persuade you to come around to my way of thinking. And I also acknowledge that Facebook appears to be the most popular social networking site right now.

Popularity, of course, implies nothing about quality. Back when videocassette recorders were introduced to the consumer market, there were two competing formats, VHS and Betamax. When I started working as a salesman in a video store in the early days of this new medium, back when I was a graduate student (wonder if anyone remembers Video Shack?), VHS was outselling Beta by two to one, and Beta disappeared within a couple of years. VHS won out, even though Beta was actually the superior format, quality-wise. The same thing has gone on in the home computer industry as, for example, the Commodore Amiga was superior to the early Macintosh computers (both used the Graphic User Interface and a mouse), while Windows is a vastly inferior operating system to the Macintosh OS, but is far and away the best selling, no matter the inroads that Mac has made over the past year or so.

So popularity is not an argument in support of Facebook. But I will also acknowledge that Facebook is the most popular form of computer-mediated communication among my students. They tell me that they check Facebook before looking at their email (if they look at their email at all). They also admit that almost all of their interaction there is with people they already know. Many of them feel creeped out when they get friend requests from strangers.

To be honest, I can't imagine what life will be like for the younger generations who will now remain in touch with everyone they meet forever, through Facebook or whatever media take its place in the future. Previously, transitions such as the move from high school to college, or into a work environment, or geographical relocations, all presented opportunites to more or less start over, and reinvent oneself. Now, we leave a long trail or long tail behind us, one that we can never fully shake. It's total recall! This may be comforting in some ways, but leaves you in the position of growing up in a small town where everyone knows all about you from the day you were born, and in the position then of living in that same small town all your life. This relates to Marshall McLuhan's observation, almost half a century ago, that on account of electronic interdependence we live in a global village.

For those of us not native to this digital environment, for us digital immigrants so to speak, the situation is a bit different. We wind up connecting to people that we have not heard from for many years, not having maintained contact when that would have required actual effort on our parts, along the lines of telephones calls and letter writing. So there is this new drive to reconnect, which has its charms and gratifications, and certainly can rekindle old friendships and relationships, especially if the loss of contact was due to situations and circumstances beyond our control, or at least that we had limited control over. And once contact was lost, it would take extraordinary effort to reconnect, especially if the other person has moved. But renewed contact also can be awkward, and ultimately result in reminding us that there were reasons why we drifted apart in the first place (this is not about anyone in particular, in case any of my old reconnected friends are reading this).

Anyway, what I was getting at is that my students find Facebook to be very much in their comfort zone, as of all the social networks out there, Facebook is about familiar and safe connections, while the other networks are more about, well, networking, meeting new people, expanding your contacts, etc. This is risky, yes, that's the trade-off, as psychologist Abraham Maslow noted long ago, safety vs. growth. We learn the most from people we don't already know. For that matter, network research shows that we gain the most from people we don't know well, for example in job hunting--that's known as the strength of loose ties. And for me, my other social networks, MySpace and Twitter, have provided great oppportunities for meeting new people, for growth and learning and networking, as opposed to Facebook.

Of course, I could pursue a more aggressive strategy of networking on Facebook, but another problem I have with the site is its Terms of Service. Simply put, they claim to own everything you put on Facebook, every word you type, every picture you upload, etc. Now, I question whether this would ever hold up in court, but who wants to have to go to court in the first place? And I question whether they could actually enforce such terms, especially given that this is diametrically opposed to the bias of the medium, which is all about sharing--let the spice and the information flow! But it does have a chilling effect, to use an old legal/policy phrase, and it's offensive on principle.

There was a recent uproar, as you may know, when Facebook changed its Terms of Service to say that they also own everything you put there even if you delete it, or delete your profile, and they also said they own everything you link to. There was so much anger generated by this that a few days later they backed off and reverted to their old Terms of Service, which still says they own everything you put up there, just not forever.

Now, they do say that the ToS doesn't mean what it says, that it means something else, but any good general semanticist will tell you that what counts is what the words say, not any inferences that anyone draws about them. When you assume... well, I try to avoid making an ass out of anyone, especially myself. And furthermore, as any good New Yorker would say, I don't like their attitude.

By the way, speaking of Facebook's Terms of Service, here's a marvelous editorial cartoon by Jeff Koterba of the Omaha World Herald:







Neil Postman would've loved that! He always used to point out how all these gadgets and media, from televison on, were great time wasters.

Anyway, getting back to why I'm not a Facebook fanboy, the thing about Facebook is that it is very clean and orderly, closed and safe, the profiles are very quiet, homogenous, with relatively little room for personalization. MySpace, by way of comparison, is much more open and chaotic, and more in tune with the do-it-yourself ethic of the online world. Profiles are customized, so are blogs, it's all very noisy and creative, full of spam and scams and phishers and the like, and full of creative activity--it's a great place for artists, musicians, poets, etc. Twitter, while minimalistic in certain ways, allows for more personalization that Facebook, and is full of hustle and bustle--it's a great place for intellectuals. Neither one makes any claim to own your words, pictures, or soul.

Facebook is very middleclass, and that's the secret to its popularity. To make an analogy, Facebook is like Fabian whereas MySpace and Twitter are more like Elvis. Or in more recent terms, Facebook is like Vanilla Ice, MySpace and Twitter are like, uh, well, you know, real rappers (if I say Public Enemy or Puff Daddy I know I'm dating myself, I just don't know rap very well, but I know full well the sanitizing process that gives us Ice Ice Baby). Ok, how about this, Facebook is like American Idol, as opposed to real rock stars. Facebook is just so very bourgois! It's whitebread, Twitter is rye, MySpace is pumpernickel. Facebook is the suburbs, MySpace is the wild frontier, Twitter is the big city. I could go on, but I'll stop here and add a bit more in another post. Oh, and do feel free to send me a friend request on Facebook, I don't mind. Or on MySpace. Or follow me on Twitter. And of Blog Time Passing of course!

Know Your Medium--Know Yourself (repost from my blog)

So, this was just a little tidbit that came to me while I was twittering away recently, so let me reiterate:

Know Your Medium

Know Yourself

or maybe I should use archaic language to make it sound better?

Know Thy Medium

Know Thyself

Take your pick, either one works for me. And I suppose I could leave it at that, keep it all oracular and aphoristic and, well, mcluhanesque, but then again maybe it's worth saying a little bit more about what this means.

Let's start with the second part. The admonition to know yourself was said to have been written outside of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, back in ancient Greece. No one's quite sure who first said, perhaps old Socrates himself, or one of the pre-Socratic philosophers and Ionian physicists such as Thales or Heraclitus, or maybe it was that old mathematician Pythagoras. Although the Oracle at Delphi is mentioned in Homer's epic poetry, and no doubt originates in the oral culture of ancient Greece, the addition of these words, and perhaps the Temple itself, is a product of a literate mindset. Indeed, it is not possible to know oneself without a mirror of some sorts. A mirror image allows us to reflect upon and become self-consicous of our looks. A mirror image of one's mind allows the same to happen regarding our thoughts, and this is exactly what writing provides. The written word lets us spill our thoughts out on a physical writing surface, freeze them to view and review, and it is only in this way that you can begin to know your own mind. Without writing, there is little capacity for introspection.

Writing then gives rise to the notion that we might have an individual self, a self that is distinct and separate from any other, not bound up inextricably in one's family and tribe, but a single self like a single cell. You might say that writing gives us a self to know, but having done so, we do not automatically set about knowing that self. To do so requires extra effort, additional consciousness raising.

Most media work in this way, extending and externalizing part of ourselves, as McLuhan makes clear in Understanding Media. Each medium, then, lets us learn a little bit more about ourselves, lets us see a different angle of ourselves. But even more basically, each medium lets us create a different self altogether, and every new medium leads to the creation of a new kind of self.

At this point I should probably invoke the perspective known as symbolic interaction, pioneered by George Herbert Mead, popularized by Erving Goffman. From this point of view, we do not have one true self, but rather many different selves, each one true in its own way. You are a different self, in large part because you play a different role, in different situations, for example, when interacting with parents, or when interacting with friends, or when interacting with lovers, or when interacting with coworkers, or when interacting with teachers, or when interacting with children, etc.

Each and every role we play is a self we create for ourselves, and we are the sum of the roles we play, the sum of the selves we construct. As H. D. Duncan has put it, we have a parliament of selves.

Each situation also involves a different relationship, and to bring in now the relational theory of Paul Watzlawick, our selves are defined in our relationships. They never exist in isolation. I can only play the role of teacher if there are students who will accept me in that role, and play their complementary parts in the relationship. They play an integral part in defining me as my teacher-self.

So, now, each medium is also a situation, as Josh Meyrowitz has argued in No Sense of Place, and each medium is also a relationship, as Kenneth Gergen shows in The Saturated Self. So, for each medium that you interact through, you construct a different and new role and self (albeit one that may be similar to others in your repetoire). When you are working with social media, this is very obvious at the moment you create a profile for yourself, but the process doesn't end after the profile is finished. In fact, it has only just begun. You create your self though your subsequent communication behaviors, as your relate to and interact with others. This connects, then, to my previously posted point that You Are What You Tweet.

So, in order to know which self you are at any given time, you have to know which medium or media you are communicating within. And to fully know that self, you have to know that medium well, to understand its nature, its biases, its impact and its effects--its media ecology, so to speak.

So, if you know your medium, you can also know yourself, or at least know one part of yourself, and that may be more than many people know... and if nothing else, certainly, it's a start!

You Are What You Tweet

Reposting this new item from my own blog:


So, a couple of weeks ago I got into a bit of an unpleasant exchange with someone on Twitter (my profile page is http://twitter.com/LanceStrate, in case you're interested). This involved someone who I actually first met offline and several years ago, long before Twitter was even a Twinkle in anyone's eye. Of course it was over politics. What else is new?

Anyway, this person started posting news items about a political controversy via Twitter, and all of the items had a very strong slant, or shall we say bias, one that went counter to my own leanings. Now, I am all for people being free to express their opinions. And of course, that includes having the right to respond to people expressing their opinions with your own opinions and counterarguments. So I started to respond to this person's tweets. (You can send a reply that is still public--Twitter also allows for private direct messages, but that's not what this is about--but coded as a specific reply by beginning the message with the person's Twitter name, which is their profile name preceded by the @ sign. So a specific reply to me would begin with @LanceStrate.)

So I sent a few specific replies offering a bit of a rebuttal--not much in depth political discourse is possible when Twitter only allows posts, aka tweets, of no more that 140 characters--that's why it's called microblogging. And I followed the specific replies by also posting a few items, videos actually, that presented the alternate point of view. This is uncharacteristic of me, to be sure, but I found it upsetting to see someone I know posting items that I considered biased, prejudiced propaganda. This individual did respond to me indicating that he was posting this material because American media is one-sided, and he wanted to see what the other side had to say. This sounded strange to me, since there's a difference between looking at items and posting the links on Twitter. Just to reinforce that point, here are some of the specific replies I sent as this exchange continued. While I'm only giving you my side of the story, my intent is not to win an argument, just to make a point about the medium:

if you're posting one side of a controversy, you're doing more than peeking at the other side, you are advocating for them

Now, you may disagree with me, but the point is that whatever you post can come across as a personal statement. You are implicitly saying, I am ----- and I approved this message, unless you make it clear you haven't. In response to this, I was sent what seemed to be an angry message that, in entering into a dialogue and expressing a different opinion, I was "policing" this person's messages. Given that he considered what he was doing to be his own personal communication, it must have seemed like an invasion, even though to me it came across as interpersonal messages on a public forum. So my response was the following series of tweets:

Policing? Nonsense! Your tweets are public messages, not private thoughts. They're sent to me, so I responded.

Tweeting links that reflect a position on a controversy over and over is advocacy, not "thoughts"

If you publicly advocate for a position on an issue, should you be surprised that someone else might question you or disagree?

And again, I'm not asking that you agree with me, I just think it's important to understand that one source of friction here is that there are different metaphors in play for what Twitter is, as a medium, for what it's all about. To this other person, it's a blog, it seems, a place to post items of interest to him, almost like a bookmarking function, a form of intrapersonal communication that is left open for others to view. To me, Twitter is an interactive medium through which people send messages to each other in a public forum.

In part, this also depends upon the actual technologies you use in conjunction with Twitter. If it's just something you go to on the web, it remains somewhat distanced, a list of posts. If you receive updates from the people you are following on Twitter as text messages on your mobile phone, as I do, Twitter takes on a more intimate character, and posts that you may not pay attention to as part of a long list on a web page can become offensive when one comes in as a single update on the phone.

Having said that, I do think that this all relates to the seminal work of Paul Watzlawick, as presented in the book he co-authored with Janet Beavin Bavelas and Donald D. Jackson, entitled The Pragmatics of Communication. This was one of the key works for the discipline of communication back when I was a student, and was also required reading in Neil Postman's old media ecology program at New York University. That's where Watzlawick and his colleagues presented their first axiom of communication, One cannot not communicate. The point of that is simply that everything you say or do, or don't say or do, has message value, says something one way or another, especially about yourself and your feelings. They also note that communication always functions on two different levels, one being the content level we are always aware of. The other is the relationship level, where we communicate about how to relate to one another and how to interpret the content we are sending--in fact, it is difficult to know what to make of the content unless we first have established a relationship. The relationship level is always present, but we may not be aware of it most of the time. But it is much more powerful than the content level--relationship overwhelms content, as Neil Postman and Christine Nystrom used to say in our seminar. Bring Erving Goffman into the mix, based on his well known book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and it also follows that along with establishing and maintaining relationships, we are projecting our own definitions of the situation to others, and hoping that they accept those definitions. And we are putting on a performance, playing a role, and in doing so, creating a persona or sense of self.

So, with that in mind, here are some tweets that I sent as I pondered this interaction:

When you tweet, you are not just transmitting information, you are establishing an identity, constructing a persona or self

When you tweet, you are projecting a definition of who you are, and your relationship to your "followers" and readers

Your followers and readers in turn take part in defining who you are, based on what you tweet

In other words, you are what you tweet!

This is the bottom line, because in this medium there is nothing else apart from what you put out there. There is your profile, and there's whatever URL you include, and there's your little icon. Apart from those items, you yourself are constituted, in this medium, by and through the messages you send--they create your persona, your self. In face-to-face interaction, nonverbal cues are very powerful and meaningful, and I can remain silent and communicate a great deal, especially on the relationship level. On Twitter, there is almost no nonverbal communication, it's all in what you say, if you never tweet you don't exist for all intents and purposes (silence then is truly death), so that the messages you send become you, comprise you.

Or, once again, when you are on Twitter,

YOU ARE WHAT YOU TWEET!

McLuhan Remix

This is a post I just put up on my own blog, thought it would be a good addition to The Social Moose as well.

So, I recently heard from Jamie O'Neil, an assistant professor of digital media arts at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. Canisius is a Jesuit school, like my own Fordham University--in traditional parlance, we are sister schools. And Jamie is a media ecologist who was prompted to contact me by my friend, sister media ecologist, and fellow Media Ecology Association board member Ellen Rose from the University of New Brunswick. That's in Canada, you know...

So, Jamie is also a performance artist, and he has an alias, Kurt Weibers, or I guess you could call it a stage name, pseudonym, or what have you. Here's the deal, in his own words:

Jamie O'Neil is a video/performance artist, writer and teacher. In 2002, he created the virtual identity of Kurt Weibers for usage online, in videos and live performance seminars. Kurt Weibers is the spokesman for Global Point Strategies, which developed Navel Software for organizational change, as well as numerous motivational presentations on topics ranging from creativity, listening, time management and synchronicity, to quantitative research methods for understanding culture. Kurt Weibers works as a reporter, business consultant in Norway and a DJ / VJ (on the side) the latter role being the reason for his involvement in the McLuhan Remix project.

This write-up is taken from his McLuhan Remix website, which is worth a look. It includes some explanation of the remix or mash-up phenomenon, and its relationship to Marshall McLuhan, as well as a short video essay entitled, naturally enough, McLuhan Remix, which is made up of three YouTube videos. You can play them continuously on his McLuhan Remix page, but I will also embed them here for your convenience, dear reader:

McLuhan Remix: Prologue 1/3



McLuhan Remix: The Medium is the Mix 2/3



McLuhan Remix: Epilogue 3/3





There's other interesting material on kurtweibers's Channel on YouTube, which you can explore if you care to.

The bottom line, for me, is not so much that McLuhan was prescient, but simply that he was identifying the characteristics of electricity, electrical technology, and the electronic media environment, much as Lewis Mumford had done before him. Most of what is being hailed as new and unprecedented about contemporary digital technology is, in fact, characteristic of electric technology in general, and was recognized by media ecologists like Mumford and McLuhan over the course of the 20th century. That is why McLuhan is more relevant than ever today, as we continue to electrify just about everything we can. You might say that what we are doing is in one sense expanding the electronic media environment, but in another filling it in or filling it out, or to put it another way, coloring in between the power lines. Remixed drinks, anyone?