Saturday, October 18, 2008
Not-so-Social Networking
I've joined Facebook. Most of my friends seem to be migrating over there now so I followed behind in order to keep track of them.
From just a few hours spent looking at it, it seems an odd place. For a social network it seems designed to stop people having conversations. I always found the LJ commenting system rather clumsy and, at least until they gave us the ability to see where we'd commented recently, difficult to sustain a conversation with the start thread dropping ever further down the pile, but compared to the commenting system on Facebook it's positively state-of-the-art. Just looking at the 12 pages of discussion in the Facebook Group about Julie Bindel's transphobia is a monumental effort to navigate, what with only a few posts per page and no way to link conversations together so that everyone has to shout to one another about which post they're replying to. If Facebook is a social network then it's the social network of a very busy pub where you can't do much more than make occasional eye contact with other people and have to restrict yourself to shouting incredibly terse comments between one another. Blogger is ideal for egomaniacs like me in that it allows me to expound my thoughts at any length and restricts your interference to the comments box underneath, Facebook removes the need for me to say anything and just allows us to all stand around, wave at one another and feel smug.
From just a few hours spent looking at it, it seems an odd place. For a social network it seems designed to stop people having conversations. I always found the LJ commenting system rather clumsy and, at least until they gave us the ability to see where we'd commented recently, difficult to sustain a conversation with the start thread dropping ever further down the pile, but compared to the commenting system on Facebook it's positively state-of-the-art. Just looking at the 12 pages of discussion in the Facebook Group about Julie Bindel's transphobia is a monumental effort to navigate, what with only a few posts per page and no way to link conversations together so that everyone has to shout to one another about which post they're replying to. If Facebook is a social network then it's the social network of a very busy pub where you can't do much more than make occasional eye contact with other people and have to restrict yourself to shouting incredibly terse comments between one another. Blogger is ideal for egomaniacs like me in that it allows me to expound my thoughts at any length and restricts your interference to the comments box underneath, Facebook removes the need for me to say anything and just allows us to all stand around, wave at one another and feel smug.
