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Eman's Diary - My Thoughts, Rants, and Ambitions
Eman's Diary - My Thoughts, Rants, and Ambitions
Facebook's Empire

I have been bombarded with emails and requests from friends and people I havent been in touch with for what seems like centuries to join a growing empire of faces.. yes, I am talking about Facebook. I think I am one of the only few people out there who is not part of the network and so much so, that at this point, I refuse to be a part of it.

I come in to the LSE library "which is meant to be a studious place", and instead people are talking about the search for Orlando Bloom, the posting of messages, and the poking, all on Facebook. While this is not to say that the network does not have any advantages to becoming a member, but at this point, I feel that it has become just that - just another network, one of the many online. Wait until the next one comes along and steals all of Facebook's members. In an article in the London paper yesterday evening, Facebook was given the credit for starting this new global social phenomenon. Please!! It started a long time ago, with far more worthy causes attached.

I am reading a lot of literature nowadays from Manuel Castells (great book by the way) to Chris Atton to Andrew Chadwick (a must read) on alternative media and the internet, and the power that they can have in changing our notion of community and in instilling change in our social environments. So perhaps that is why I am growing skeptical of Facbook, which seems to me, all about the popularity aspect and not really about trying to make the world a smaller place using low cost technologies and at a faster speed. What could have added value to the alternative media debate has now turned to yet another mainstream medium, making $50 million a year from banner ad sales and sponsorship deals and with its worth far exceeding $2 billion.

May 22, 2007 | 12:14 PM Comments  1 comments

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albertomz Alberto Masetti-Zannini
May 23, 2007 | 11:30 AM
I'm with you
I couldn't agree more. The pressure to join Facebook is beginning to have sinister undertones - it reminds me of when young student refused to join the Hitlerjugend back in Germany in 1933. Why, this is so much fun, there must be something wrong with you if you refuse to join us. It makes me feel uncomfortable and resentful, especially since it's so hard to find a computer on campus because so many students are taking up PCs to Facebook each other.

There have been a number of interesting articles on the subject so far, including a good editorial on the FT, available here. Mostly, they focus on the ephemeral nature of such social networks, whose whole purpose is to tap into the desire for novelty typical of adolescent crowds. When their attention will veer in a different direction, Facebook will come crashing down, just like the many others before it. Purposeful networks like TIG, on the other hand, which provide a rich content that addresses the specific needs of members, and a user-friendly interface, will only become stronger with time. In this sense, these are the self-reinforcing networks Castells refers to in its masterpiece.

But there is something more complex to this, and it's about tapping the infinite potential of crowd behaviour. I posted about this recently in relation to self-regulating urban traffic. What makes crowds behave in certain ways? What is the interface between emergent systems of social organisation and culture/gender/age/race/class/religion/whatever? And is technology cancelling the faultlines of group behaviour, or reinforcing them?

So many questions...
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