Posts Tagged Under ‘Facebook’

Things

• For a heavy but very good read, check out this New Yorker article on the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. (h/t Mark.) For some reason we haven’t seen many big pieces mentioning the impact of extra-tough interrogation tactics—the euphemism bell just went off—on the interrogators themselves, but this piece notes that it’s not just the bad guys suffering psychological damage.
• On another note from the article, it seems that one argument for putting the detainees through a regular trial is the simple need to be able to put them somewhere. In the meantime, the best the government can do for the “What do we do with these guys once they’re not as immediately useful?” question seems to be a big shrug. If there’s not a court record of a trial and later sentencing, thirty years from now we’ll still be asking ourselves, “Why exactly are we still hiding a bunch of dangerous Arab and Pakistani guys in Poland when it would have been a lot easier to have just tried and sentenced them to our supermax in Colorado?”
• As much as today’s political climate can be depressing, it’s a lot easier to be 27 in 2007 than it was in 1917.
• One easy way to make your online comment / argument look less intelligent and original is to post song lyrics along with it. I was reading a dude’s critique of the media in some comments section recently and he posted the refrain to “March of the Pigs” by Nine Inch Nails, as if the creative effort of an artist who isn’t you is a good stand-in for using things like applicable facts, reason and logic to show that you know stuff.

  Nope.

• This past week saw a mild embarrassment for Rudy Giuliani’s campaign thanks to his daughter’s Facebook membership in “One million strong for Barack”. Meanwhile, it seems that every editor I know from either TIME or Slate (I just gotta use internal title style—force of habit) got together recently and agreed to set up profiles, so now I’m Facebooked in with all the work peeps. So, just a friendly reminder that you never know who’s checking your stuff (probably me, because Facebook is great), and then sometimes you do know, and that person’s kind of a big deal.

  “What?! The Internet is public?! Who knew?”

Peace, I’m out.

Class Divide Online?

Drop Internet knowledge, you say.

Alright.

I just read this interesting article (thanks, Jeremiah) from the BBC about how the Facebook - MySpace divide among teenagers also mirrors American class divisions. There’s certainly something to this. Not to prove a point from my earlier Jason Taylor post, but when I search high-school classmates on Facebook, I only get 11 results; on MySpace, I get 121. I tried this same thing searching for my college classmates to get the upper-crust perspective (let’s face facts about the majority of peeps who attend Northwestern), but Facebook won’t return more than 500 search results.

You can take the analogy even further than that: the craziness and totally unfiltered atmosphere of MySpace and the guideline-driven, orderly approach of Facebook in some ways mirrors the way our capitalist society works: the people at the top are a smaller group who tend to be more comfortable working the system and staying within a certain set of rules while building a secluded and idyllic existence, leaving everyone else who can’t or doesn’t want to join in to fend for themselves in a Hobbesian-type wizorld. Most people are on the outside looking in, kind of similar to how MySpace has a far larger customer base than Facebook.

But while you can make the outside-looking-in argument against Facebook, it’s equally easy for Facebook to make the basic marketing appeal of “come join our pleasant world, away from the noise” against MySpace: the social-networking world of MySpace outside the refined, neat, well-laid-out confines of Facebook is cacophonous, confusing, vulgar and, mostly, really damned stupid. (Also browser-crashing. Can’t leave out browser-crashing.) In a mirror of conservative critique of modern culture, if principled web design stands in for societal culture, then MySpace is setting the culture back faster and faster every day. When you want a break from the clatter, sometimes you just have to clutter together with like-minded people. Enter Facebook: the U Street of the Internet. For those of you who don’t live in DC, that’s a fast-growing neighborhood with lots of cultural history and cool places to chill, but suffering a potential influx of gentrifiers who can partially appreciate the appeal of the place but will kill that appeal by their growing presence. Kind of like Facebook opening up to high schoolers.

Finally, there’s the way both sites are run. Like the upper reaches of society, Facebook isn’t afraid to crib coolness when it sprouts up from the ranks of the masses, so long as that coolness can fit into its defined limits. (Think new Facebook apps.) And the guys with the power over the MySpace masses know that they probably should do better with restricting the negative consequences of the free-for-all, like porn-site friend-invite spam and the massive amounts of junk, but too many people are clamoring for the freedom to put junk onto their pages that restriction would just invite massive rebellion. (Think the drug war or Prohibition.)

I’m a Facebook man myself, though I also have the neglected MySpace account when I want a nod toward populism. But I gotta admit, that clean layout and crap-free functionality—even if it’s just the manufactured invention of some web designer—is just so freakin’ appealing. I guess that makes me a social-networking latté liberal? Either way, coffee tastes like dirt. And I mean that with no connection to my analogy at all, because coffee really does taste like dirt. It’s disgusting.

Knowledge dropped.

P.S. - Sorry, Friendster.