Felix Stalder on Thu, 17 Jan 2013 19:04:35 +0100 (CET) |
[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]
Re: <nettime> Facebook's perfect spam laboratory |
Hi Ed, Thanks for your thoughtful reply. Generally, I don't think Facebook forces anything on people. It's more subtle, and it's embedded in a general, let's say, neo-liberal context. As both traditional communities and traditional hierarchies are grumbling, people are pushed, and are pulling, to create new social context for their lives. One of the tools they have at their disposal is Facebook, and whatever Facebook affects, it does so in relationship with many other forces, some of them counteracting whatever Facebook does, others amplifying it. That said, from what I can see from the outside, and from the inside in other social media networks, frames this deep human urge to find recognition and the current social pressures to build you're own networks, in very particular ways, and attaching a precise in order to jump outside one's own network of friends, and differentiating this price in relation to the "importance" of the person is a very crass way of framing things. Now, the fact that Facebook does this framing in a particular way, does not mean that people are simply accepting this and not finding other ways of using these powerful resources, but still, such suggestion of how to communicate, or, really, how to think, are powerful. Again, facebook is part of a very complex infrastructure and people move in and out of various elements of it as they see fit. I'm sure most activists of Anonymous have also facebook accounts, but they do not use it for their activities as Anonymous. Yes, I totally agree, media determinism is self-defeating and my post, written sloppily, might have suggested that. But that's not point I want to make. But the fact that there are many forces at play, doesn not mean that they are all equally strong or that they cancel each other out into some general neutrality. Felix On 01/15/2013 09:04 PM, Ed Phillips wrote:
Felix, I find myself heartened to see your thoughts in my inbox, and that has been the case for me for many years. But perhaps that is because I "friended" you on nettime many years ago. And because I have developed a respect for your capacities and your efforts, I actually do bother to try to make sense of what your write and I try to get at the more elusive truth of what you think and the still more elusive truth of "what is actually going on" through the lens of what you think.
<...> -|- http://felix.openflows.com ------------------------ books out now: | *|Cultures & Ethics of Sharing/Kulturen & Ethiken des Teilens UIP 2012 *|Vergessene Zukunft. Radikale Netzkulturen in Europa. transcript 2012 *|Deep Search. The Politics of Searching Beyond Google. Studienv. 2009 *|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions. Scheidegger&Spiess2008 *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society.Polity P. 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed Futura / Revolver, 2005 | # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org