“I despise Facebook,” says Tom Hodgkinson in a Guardian article today. He asks, “…does Facebook really connect people? Doesn’t it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.”
Hodgkinson elaborates his critique for several more paragraphs before getting to the meat: The people on the board at Facebook are the charmingly post adolescent Mark Zuckerberg, the ultralibertarian Peter Thiel, and Wal-Mart board member Jim Breyer. The implication here is that what Wal-Mart has done for your own community, Facebook will do for the web.
The most amusing part of Hodgkinson’s article is a little exercise he shares at the end. He provides a summary of the Facebook privacy policy and suggests you substitute the words “Big Brother” wherever you see “Facebook.”
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
bmo 01.14.08 at 8:51
Feh.
Frank Paynter 01.14.08 at 10:38
Elaboration plz.
Mike Golby 01.15.08 at 6:57
“Doesn’t it rather disconnect us…?”
Nah… It’s just another way of putting stuff up on the Web. Perhaps it disconnects those chasing traffic, ‘friends’, or high quiz scores on idiot apps from their blogrolls, but that’s their scene. For others, it’s a DummyBlog and it’s useful as such.
It’s another way of putting stuff up on the Web; another way of staying in touch. Better than what I have now — I’m a few days short of a month off the Web due to lightning. Internet’s not a big deal in South Africa (not even my ISP is very enthusiastic), but I expect a modem sometime this week.
Feh!
bmo 01.15.08 at 7:07
” A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.”
A good article, btw. Very good. But I’m from the camp that suspects that Google is ‘owned’ by the Pentagon. I cannot in any way prove that. It’s just my suspicious mind.
The gloomy image of a man sitting home alone on saturday night facebooking and drinking at his desk. My God what I wouldn’t give for that sort of isolation. I have ‘intimate’ human contact - and by that, I mean contact where i am either manipulated or do the manipulating - on a daily basis with anywhere from ten to forty people. I crave that sort of isolation.
The entire internet thing is isolation itself. Cyberspace is the gap between your ass and your chair. Yes, it often allows us to connect, if we are extremely active and engaged about it, but the social aspect has always been complete hogwash, or at least overplayed. But again that’s just me.
In fact I would suggest that this is Facebook’s main appeal. The escape from our immediate dismal surroundings.
More elaboration later, now, it’s into the fray.
Jon H. 01.16.08 at 12:07
Wasn’t it on this blog that there was a link to the video clip of a woman singing “hell Is Other people” ? Or was that on bmo’s blog ?
Facebook is just a transitional technology. Depending upon how you look at it, it is introducing us to what we don’t want to do on the Web (some don’t want to play, some don’t want to be serious, and as Mike says, some just want to put up stuff). It can be seen as helping us to whittle away at the mass customization of life we are all wittingly or not moving into (just an opinion).
Or, it is helping us realize how much we don’t want to be connected (much) to anyone other than a few family, friends and neighbours in about a one-to-two hundred kilometre radius from where we live because we realize it takes time, work, luck and persistence to create and sustain relationships that give us as much as we put into them.
I would never have gotten to know bmo reasonably well without this technology, and for that small benefit I am quite grateful. We seem to be able to bore each other quite well whenever we talk. And bmo, watch what you’re calling “complete hogwash” … remember, not so long ago you once actually drove a few hundred kilometres to go out to dinner and for a completely purposeless walk