I noticed this trend some years ago, to my own despair. I first noticed
it in the way, month by month, the quality of many mailing list
discussions deteriorated and then fell mostly silent. I noticed it in
how I encountered increasingly vitriolic responses to posts on any topic
that exceeded more than a single paragraph. The act of reading was
becoming an ever-worsening imposition, making coherent on-line
discussion increasingly difficult. In space advocacy forums, people
would complain about how no one ever presented any 'plans' for doing
anything then, when those plans were posted, those same people would
complain about being expected to read them--like you were supposed to
reduce every highly technical discussion to a bullet list.
Increasingly, mailing list based groups moved to Facebook pages on the
premise that this was now where all the people were, which was true, but
when my own forums went there I cautioned that the mode of use compelled
by the Facebook interface was tailored to mobile devices and didn't
allow for any form of coherent discussion. You could see this in how
crude its text editing was, and how quickly you hit the wall in
character count. It was a 'browsing' platform--a form originating in
bulletin board and news aggregator sites--prone to what I call
'browser's syndrome'; a cyclic scanning of 'news' in small chunks that
creates a sort of hypnotic state which is disrupted by text that compels
active conscious thought. It's a way of coping with an overwhelming
volume of information by applying a kind of compartmentalization and
rhythm to its assimilation. In effect, when people seemed to act
compulsively angrily at any long post it was because they were
responding to it the way a commuter does when encountering a traffic
jam. It breaks the rhythm of the browsing routine. Disrupts the flow.
Demands attention when people really want that steady thought-quelling
rhythm of news-bytes, like the rocking of a cradle, or maybe the drum
beat of the hortator... I worried that a lot of these groups would be
killed by going to Facebook, their subject matter too sophisticated for
such structure, and I was proved right. But what could you do? Facebook
had all the eyeballs and it didn't so much shape the trend as conform to
it. Personal computing itself was shifting from big screens to small.
The ergonomics of reading was being changed to suit.
Facebook's appeal rests in the still intractable problem of the
internet's vast scale and 'structurelessness', which relates to the
limitations of the search engine to function as a coherent internet
front-end. Facebook sort of crudely solves today the problem the
Semantic Web is intended to solve some time in the future--and which
used to be characterized by past futurists in the idea of the
'personalized electronic daily newspaper'. I used to describe UNIX as
being like visiting Tokyo during a blackout--having to navigate a vast
city by flashlight. This is pretty-much what the Internet has long been
like; passive, invisible, waiting for you to make some effort to go in
and explore it with some collection of tools like a spelunker. You can't
really do anything useful with, or get benefit from, the internet until
you've established a kind of sub-net of your own into it that you can
navigate, more-or-less, in a routine. This is what the features of web
browsers were, crudely, about; creating default entry points into the
net, giving you a memory of frequently used locations. News aggregators,
like Reddit, emerged as a means to pool effort into making the internet
more visible through a sort of centralized community window organized by
topics, replacing the flashlight with a spotlight. As these became
larger they became a kind of push-information front-end to the newest
information on-line that you could brows like a newspaper. Facebook
offers a kind of personalized push-info view into a certain portion of
the internet--albeit rather crude. That personal electronic newspaper
spit out of your combination toaster/coffeemaker/computer. You could
argue it's what the web browser itself was really supposed to evolve
into but didn't. Recently, analysts have discovered that, in many
countries, large numbers of people can't tell the difference between the
internet and Facebook because they don't really understand the
relationship between the two. They will deny being 'internet users'
while being avid Facebook users. They think they're two completely
different things; the internet a 'computer thing' and Facebook what you
use on a smartphone. Facebook has become a kind of Windows OS over the
Internet (often, people's first interaction with it), with people no
longer cognizant there's still something like DOS underneath.
Facebook may command the biggest mainstream mass of eyeballs, but it's a
fundamentally inadequate communication medium and I think that will
succumb to other media concepts in time. We're in a phase now where real
competitors haven't yet been invented because developers of alternatives
are still reacting to its scale and 'corporateness' rather than its form
and structural and functional inadequacies as a communications medium.
The form itself is not yet getting questioned. It's who's running it
that people object to. The ironic thing about Facebook is that, for a
social media platform, it's not really very much about social
communication. It's really more of a short-form news/blog aggregator.
It's still just another kind of bulletin board.
On 2/22/15 10:02 AM, [email protected] wrote:
Death by Ten Billion Status Updates
How Facebook Killed the Internet
by DAVID ROVICS
Facebook killed the internet, and I’m pretty sure that the vast
majority of people didn’t even notice.
I can see the look on many of your faces, and hear the thoughts.
/Someone’s complaining about Facebook again. Yes, I know it’s a
massive corporation, but it’s the platform we’re all using. It’s like
complaining about Starbucks. After all the independent cafes have
been driven out of town and you’re an espresso addict, what to do?
What do you mean “killed”? What was killed?/
I’ll try to explain. I’ll start by saying that I don’t know what the
solution is. But I think any solution has to start with solidly
identifying the nature of the problem.
First of all, Facebook killed the internet, but if it wasn’t Facebook,
it would have been something else. The evolution of social media was
probably as inevitable as the development of cell phones that could
surf the internet. It was the natural direction for the internet to
go in.
Which is why it’s so especially disturbing. Because the solution is
not Znet or Ello. The solution is not better social media, better
algorithms, or social media run by a nonprofit rather than a
multibillion-dollar corporation. Just as the solution to the social
alienation caused by everybody having their own private car is not
more electric vehicles. Just as the solution to the social alienation
caused by everyone having their own cell phone to stare at is not a
collectively-owned phone company.
Many people from the grassroots to the elites are thrilled about the
social media phenomenon. Surely some of the few people who will read
this are among them. We throw around phrases like “Facebook
revolution” and we hail these new internet platforms that are bringing
people together all over the world. And I’m not suggesting they don’t
have their various bright sides. Nor am I suggesting you should stop
using social media platforms, including Facebook. That would be like
telling someone in Texas they should bike to work, when the whole
infrastructure of every city in the state is built for sports utility
vehicles.
--
Eric Hunting
[email protected]
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