Felix Stalder on Thu, 17 Jan 2013 19:04:35 +0100 (CET)


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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
 |



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