I'll start things off with a question I asked for a paper I wrote last year, a paper applying the thought of Marxist philosopher of capitalsm and everyday life, Henri Lefebvre (for a super-interesting class in the department of east asian studies at the U of T taught by Ken Kawashima). My starting point was a passage in his Critique of Everyday Life Vol. 2, in which Lefebvre predicts a further degeneration of an already alienating mass media. According to Lefebvre:
"The mass media shape taste and cloud judgement. They instruct and they condition. With their saturation of images,current affairs and 'news' devoid of anything new, they fascinate and they nauseate. They expand communications and they threaten coherence and thought, vocabulary and verbal expression, language itself. Will they reach the extreme point where the 'world of expression' is exhausted, where everyone will be a spactacle for everyone else, where the event will be broadcast while it is happening? We call this extreme point the Great Pleonasm, the Supreme Tautology, the Final Identification of the real with the known, surprise annihilated by the illusion of permanent surprise - ambiguity annihilated by its own triumph." (Lefebvre, 2002).
Facebook (among any number of internet functions) would appear to represent the fruition of a number of these predictions. Of course, the best news has long been news captured ‘as it happens’, but check out this cbc report (see URL below) which posits how today’s digital technology-enabled populace has enabled a scenario where the news - in this case of the Virginia Tech Massacre - is brought as “a gritty and immediate reality for millions”.
At the same time, I think we can certainly see the sometimes ‘pleonastic’ (pleonasm = an excess of words) nature of Facebook (or MySpace, or blogs). For a vivid example, here’s an exerpt from a New Yorker article about Facebook (which is, incidentally, a great backgrounder for those not too familiar with Facebook - again, see URL below):
"Harvard Facebook members belong to more than ten thousand, many of which exist only online. The appeal of such groups – including Harvard People for the Eating of Tasty Animals (forty members), I Went to a Public School…Bitch (twenty-five hundred members), Jews Who Love Booze (fifteen members), and The We Need to Have Sex in Widener Before We Graduate Interest Group (a hundred and forty members)—is that they allow students to promote different aspects of their identities while showing off their collegiate wit. 'It may well look like dog food,' says the home page of the group Cracklin’ Oat Bran Is the Shit (eight-four members). 'But we all know that cracklin’ oat bran is an amazing cereal. We don’t just eat it for breakfast either. We eat it for every meal of the day. Cracklin’ oat brain isn’t just a cereal; it’s a way of life.'"
Yet for Lefebvre, this sort of alienation is actually a realienation; or it should be. The process of alienation in everyday life is one of alienation-disalienation-realienation, where disalienation constitutes a critique of the ambiguities present in everyday life. This is true of all modes of consumption, where Lefebvre’s central example (or one of them) is the leisure industry. The question with regards to Facebook, then, is, as an extremely popular new kind of consumption, what is its critique? What sorts of alienations and ambiguities within the context of everyday life does it address?
New Yorker: www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/05/15/060515fa_fact_cassidy
CBC report: www.cbc.ca/world/story/2007/04/17/websites-virginia.html
Work Cited: Lefebvre, H. 2002. Critique of Everyday Life Vol. 2, Verso
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4 comments:
Just a thought regarding your question: there is a third party application on facebook called a "friend wheel." Here is its description:
"The circle shows part of a social network. Around the edge of the circle are X's friends. If two of them are connected by a line, it means that they are friends with each other. Relationships between different groups of friends (eg. "Home friends" and "University/College friends") can often be seen in the circle. It's also brightly coloured and looks pretty."
The result is a multi-coloured web of interconnections, a physical map of your social network, with You in the centre. It's sort of a visual manifestation of what facebook is. A way to virtually surround yourself with all of your friends (though how many of them truly are?) that could be seen as a way of disalienating oneself from the ambiguities of relationships in everyday life that we don't always know how to define.
Since I took the same course on the everyday life and spent quite a few hours struggling with Lefebvre’s arguments, I’ll try to guess how Lefebvre would respond to your questions.
He’d probably argue that Facebook addresses an alienation of being unable to connect with one’s acquaintances offline, but then the moment of disalienation transforms into realienation because technology-mediated communication is not live communication and in that sense is alienating. So, in a form of a brainstorming, Facebook is a critique of everyday life in that it points to 1) the lack of opportunities to communicate in person, thus it might be a critique of the rhythm of everyday life, or possibly of the alienating social relations of work that preclude communication. 2) The popularity of FAcebook can also be interpreted as a critique of an unexciting nature of real-life communication; I think Lefebvre could link it to boredom that plagues bourgeoisie and can be superseded only by proletarian labour... 3) Facebook offers set options to define one’s relationships to others, etc—this could be interpreted as an alienation from one’s self because one does not define a relationship spontaneously but rather based on a pre-defined options, and in that sense one is alienated from one’s own relations to other people 4) Facebook groups/networks feature might be a critique of possibilities for praxis and how they are realized in a way which offers a temporary disalienation—connecting with likely minded people on the FAcebook—but also an immediate realienation because this connection does not transform into praxis but stays only on the Facebook.
Those were a few ideas to keep the discussion going, I haven’t thought of it well enough to take a position, but I tried to answer you in the spirit of Lefebvre’s argument in the Critique of everyday life...
Check out this story--it relates to what we discussed about Google in the Red Room
TECHNOLOGY | November 7, 2007
Advertising: Facebook Is Marketing Your Brand Preferences (With Your Permission)
By LOUISE STORY
The social networking site now sells ads that display people’s profile photos next to commercial messages that are shown to their friends about items they purchased or registered an opinion about.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/07/technology/07adco.html?ex=1195102800&en=20926f8bb0a03450&ei=5070
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