The Era of Facebook Is an Anomaly

An anonymous reader writes "Speaking to The Verge, author and Microsoft Researcher Danah Boyd put words to a feeling I've had about Facebook and other social networking sites for a while, now: 'The era of Facebook is an anomaly.' She continues, 'The idea of everybody going to one site is just weird. Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space. Fragmentation is a more natural state of being. Is your social dynamic interest-driven or is it friendship-driven? Are you going there because there's this place where other folks are really into anime, or is this the place you're going because it's where your pals from school are hanging out? That first [question] is a driving function.' Personally, I hope this idea continues to propagate — it's always seemed odd that our social network identities are locked into certain websites. Imagine being a Comcast customer and being unable to email somebody using Time Warner, or a T-Mobile subscriber who can't call somebody who's on Verizon. Why do we allow this with our social networks?"

Comments

Laughable

[Anonymous Coward]

"None ever used this thing that wasn't available before, therefore (loads of rationalizations)"

Re:Laughable

[ShieldW0lf]

The basic premise, that it is an anomaly for us to come together into a common social space, is so ridiculous that I have to wonder what her agenda is for making such a blatantly false claim.

People came together from their community to the marketplace to socialize. People came together at church every single Sunday.

Beyond the reaches of the individual community, people of almost every faith used to come together for pilgrimage, allowing them to socialize with other members of their faith from far away places and become more worldly and less ignorant. This was considered a moral duty.

The point isn't to go where people who are your friends are, or to go to places where people who are into the same hobbies. The point is to grow as a human being by leaving your comfort zone.

The real anomaly is in the walls that keep us from knowing each other. It keeps us weak, powerless and under control.

Re:Laughable

[dingen]

The basic premise, that it is an anomaly for us to come together into a common social space, is so ridiculous that I have to wonder what her agenda is for making such a blatantly false claim.

People came together from their community to the marketplace to socialize. People came together at church every single Sunday.

You don't get it. The point is that the entire world didn't come together at the same marketplace, or the same church building, or live in the same city for that matter. It's unnatural for humans to all be in the same spot to socialize, we rather split up in groups of manageable size. That's the premise of the author. Now whether that's true or false remains to be seen, but at least understand the point the article is trying to make.

Re:Laughable

[denzacar]

Also, whoever wrote that does not realize that Facebook is not a site or social space but a service.

So that argument could just as well be used against a telephone, postal service, roads... with equal relevance and correctness.

Re:It's called

[danomatika]

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

Give me one other part of history where everybody

[bigdavex]

Phone system?

Misunderstanding Facebook

[cstacy]

Facebook is not a place that everyone goes to. It is merely a hosting platform where people create zillions (of partially overlapping) "places" that they go to. Those millions of people are not on your Friends list. Facebook is millions of "places", not one. (However, George Takei's page is indeed the one single place in the world where everyone goes. But just for his stuff; nobody reads the comments.) As for Facebook "bombarding your news feed with useless information 24x7", ummm, that doesn't happen to me. Get a life?

Imagine a world

[markdavis]

>"author and Microsoft Researcher Danah Boyd [...] Imagine being a Comcast customer and being unable to email somebody using Time Warner, or a T-Mobile subscriber who can't call somebody who's on Verizon. Why do we allow this with our social networks?"

That's a good question, Ms. "Microsoft researcher". Perhaps you can imagine a world where people can exchange documents freely and accurately without proprietary software like MS-Word. Or a world where consumers can put any OS they want on any computer without MS working with vendors to try and block them at the BIOS level. Or imagine people sharing calendar events easily without using MS's Exchange/Outlook formats. MS tried to hijack the web with IE (and did so successfully for years), and lied about their competitors to prevent diversity, locked out vendors from including Linux or other FOSS on machines, corrupted exported filters to make sure files to/from competitors would be partially broken. And the list goes on and on. Microsoft has been responsible for more lock-in and anti-compatibility than any other tech company, so perhaps I find it ironic that someone from Microsoft would ask us to imagine any kind of world of incompatibility.

Re:

[v(*_*)vvvv]

> by leaving your comfort zone.

How is socializing with other members of your faith leaving your comfort zone? Church IS your comfort zone. So is the marketplace where you gather with FRIENDS.

>The real anomaly is in the walls that keep us from knowing each other.

Like the one that surrounds facebook, and the walls within facebook that prevent certain interactions between its members.

There can be only one.

[Immerman]

Two words: Network effects.

Facebook succeeds not because it's anything special, but because a critical mass of the population uses it, and each person can independently decide the shape of their "community". If I meet someone new in the real world, and want to keep up with what's going on in their life, odds are we're both on Facebook. Nobody else offers that. A new competitor could start that was 100x better than Facebook in every technological way, but until they reached a critical mass of users nobody would care.