As more and more conversations emerge in the wake of the Facebook-healthcare-reform-status-update-meme, I've been drawn to more and more interesting ideas about the (real or otherwise) convergence of politics and social/viral forms. Beginning with a post from Gerry Canavan, followed up by a post from American Stranger, the issues of viral politics obviously falls short of actual public demonstration and likewise still counts for something (beyond the subtle commodification of certain political perspectives, as all social-network-perspectives are readily available for this sort of packaging).
In his post Stranger(or Traxus) links to this fun write up about the tensions between Facebook and MySpace, a debate my generation has been entrenched in. One of my most memorable initiations with MySpace happened as I was slumming with some of my musician friends in LA as their tour brought them to The Roxy. The day of the show the boys each spent over an hour on their respective MySpace pages looking at provocative photos of young ladies and writing on their profile walls, encouraging these ladies to attend that night's concert. (The boys also spent about an hour each flat ironing their hair.) I was quite skeptical of the MySpace revolution as it garbled up most of my actual social circle, thus my experiences were based mainly on how my male friends would try to pick up on girls while simultaneously achieving a lot of self promotion for whatever hobby or artistic endeavor they were involved in. I had a long term relationship at the time and my band wasn't touring the country and therefore I never signed up on MySpace. Mostly what I remember of the first users was their ages, all late teens to early twenties, our pioneers of social networking sites.
Five years later my long term relationship became a marriage and my wife created a Facebook account in my name so that she could keep in touch with her friends while simultaneously ensuring that her High School students (and co-workers) could not find and/or view her profile. (Yes, I'm aware that you can edit your settings and she has created her own account since then.) But since this moment I've also amassed a pretty large group of friends without trying very hard and the more I think about it, the more homogeneous all of these friends seem in the wake of reading the above Facebook-MySpace article. This is not to say that I was unaware of this phenomenon, but that I was also perhaps neglecting it's significance. I bring this to light so that we might consider the relative similarity between Gerry Canavan's and my own recent Facebook status update phenomenon. The telling detail is that likely most of our "friends" all fall into a relatively similar political perspective, class, race, etc., etc.
But also today I was reading this (via GC's blog) about Marx, Taylorism, childhood, and amusement. And beyond the fact that the picture on the right, plus a mountain lion, should definitely be the cover of the new Abraham Lincoln, the final paragraph of the post really hits home:
It's almost as if no one who doesn't have a product to sell or an axe to grind takes the world of children and childhood all that seriously.
And here I am recalling the development of (private)social networks, explicitly how they shape and have been shaped by children-teens-young "naive" adults.
It's no discovery that a large part of our economy is made up of marketing to children. I've got a neighbor who doesn't have any television access because she doesn't want her two boys hounding her for new plastic toys after they watch cartoons; we all remember New Kids on the Block via N'Sync; the current wave of full print tee-shirts; the sheer volume of a store like Target devoted to childrens toys, school supplies, clothing, music, DVDs, and videogames (it's probably half of their inventory and sales). But the fact that this "demographic" which fueled the rise of social networking, has also been the main deterrent from MySpace for adults and those of the white background Facebook interface, informs us again that none of these forms exist to bring us together. As Dana Boyd says, they mirror society and our prejudices are reflected in them. Which is to say Facebook is the new virtual Shady Terrace gated community where we continue to seek private spaces free of prying (foreign) eyes. A spacial relation and fear Jameson condemns oh so eloquently in Postmodernism:
Here a certain Nietzscheanism operates to defuse anxiety and even fear: the conviction, however gradually learned and acquired, that there is only the present and that it is always "ours," is a kind of wisdom that cuts both ways. For it was always clear that the terror of such near futures ---like the analogous terror of an older naturalism--- was class based and deeply rooted in class comfort and privilege. The older naturalism let us briefly experience the life and the life world of the various underclasses, only to return with relief to our own living rooms and armchairs: the good resolutions it may also have encouraged were always, then, a form of philanthropy. In the same way, yesterday's terror of the overcrowded conurbations of the immediate future could just as easily be read as a pretext for complacency with our own historical present, in which we do not yet have to live like that. In both cases, at any rate, the fear is that of proletarianization, of slipping down the ladder, of losing a comfort and a set of privileges which we tend increasingly to think of in spatial terms: privacy, empty rooms, silence, walling other people out, protection against crowds and other bodies. Nietzschean wisdom, then, tells us to let go of that kind of fear and reminds us that whatever social and spatial form our future misery may take, it will not be alien because it will by definition be ours. Dasein ist je mein eigens---defamiliarization, the shock of otherness, is a mere aesthetic effect and a lie.
This again echos Boyd's narrative of the great MySpace exodus of maturing and well to do youth, which we can read as the spacial distancing of classes, the elites from the others. That these networks of varied private providers are also explicitly private spaces, indefinitely not public spaces, therefore aligns them quite nicely with the (exclusive) public spaces of our previous eras (again as noted in Boyd's lecture).
Likewise these networks exist as Traxus/Stranger appropriately notes, to keep us off the streets, but in doing so we are also appeased to just like children in the demo area of the Crayola factory seeking constant interaction with quizzes, updates, nostalgic and genuine friendships, all those empty boxes of archaic production we feel obliged to consume. In other words, we are the children of Taylorism; our dwindling factories full of autonomous working machinery are correlations of our public spaces (real and/or privatized), our atmospheres littered with the negative space tweets and virtual political updates.
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