There are two standard cliches that feature in almost every op/ed about social networking sites. Pedophiles are lurking on the intertubes, and most people write narcissistic nonsense about their cats. (As if there’s anything wrong with catblogging, and narcissism is in the eye of the beholder - most people’s conversations or photos or activities are important to them and their friends and family - even if they’re not deemed worthy of consumption or notice by media elites and some cultural critics.)
Writing in Crikey, Guy Rundle manages to avoid recycling at least one of those canards, but he fails to avoid another one beloved of the intellectual left:
After the novelty of having 900 ‘friends’ wears off, people will find that, though useful, social networking is cold and non-reciprocal, the measure of an atomised society rather than the answer to it.
As a sociologist, I’m automatically sceptical of claims that social interaction is somehow debased if it takes place online. There’s an element of the privileging of speech over writing that the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida famously traced back to Plato, and there’s a bigger element of a romantic suspicion of technology. Community, it’s often said, has been rent asunder by capitalism.
Well, maybe. I think this is to misinterpret what late modern capitalist societies actually do in performing the work of individualisation, and also to vastly underestimate the human ability to form connections and community using tools not necessarily solely intended for that purpose (is it the profit making mainstreaming of social media that sets socialist alarm bells ringing?)…
In any case, I think it’s a species of a sort of romantic left technophobic utopia, a nostalgic dreaming of and longing for an idealised communal space which the better Marxists always understood to be just that - a postulate which overwrote real hierarchies, conflicts and dissensus in actually existing real life communities. There’s also the SeaChange fallacy at work here - we romanticise living in a small town, but those who have grown up in one often bemoan the cloying intrusiveness of a community “where everyone knows your name” and celebrate the day they escaped to the anonymity of the city - free, within limits of course, to re-imagine themselves and find and build their own niches.
Last year, when I wanted to take issue with Rundle over an article in Crikey he wrote about blogging, I found that it was impossible to locate an email address for him by googling. So I resorted to a less human form of interaction – I wrote a reply without being able to discuss his claims with him. There are several people who are on Facebook with the name “Guy Rundleâ€? but the profiles that might be his carry no photo and are hidden from public view. So, instead of having a chat, we cross like ships in the night through writing Crikey articles. In a sense, the debate really doesn’t take place, and for all the piffle about public discourse and an academic or literary community, we’re really just taking potshots text by text.
Coincidentally, and I reported this not without irony the other day, I happened across this op/ed in The Age by Rachel Hills because I’m one of her friends on Facebook.
The most popular explanation for the popularity of websites such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and LiveJournal is simple narcissism. The detailed lists of interests and carefully compiled photo galleries that profiles tend to feature, along with a tendency to accumulate “friends” like baseball cards, certainly support this. But this interpretation misses a vital part of the equation. These sites are popular because they allow users to share who they are and what they care about with their friends and communities and, in the process, connect with other people in a way that usually facilitates rather than replaces offline interaction.
[My emphasis.]
Hills also makes the point that sites like Facebook (and LinkedIn) push users towards a profile under their real name – as most of the point is to maintain, revive and extend networks that originate offline – at university or through professional life. In other words, it deepens and extends actually existing community - contra Rundle. (Though Rundle is also factually wrong that Facebook automatically imports all your email contacts and doesn’t offer you autonomy either over whom you choose to invite or friend or over the degree of privacy you want to have over your profile and its components.)
In my experience of Facebook, it’s a fantastic way to touch base with people you’ve lost sight of, share information, and just let off steam by being silly. That sounds to me like the very opposite of atomisation. It feels, bluntly, like community.
Technology is rarely good or bad in itself, as Rundle surely knows. While claims about their liberatory potential shouldn’t be exaggerated, the significance of sites like Facebook and the explanation for their rapid growth lies in the way in which you can actively shape your own use of the site.
Rundle uses the analogy of a pub. If I wander down to my local, I’m not surrounded by people I want to chat with – a la Cheers. I’m surrounded by actually atomised individuals largely focussed on playing the pokies or picking up or picking a fight or picking a winner in the sixth at Randwick, boring the barmaid to tears, or playing pool with their mates and guess what, no one else is invited. In any case, Cheers only worked as drama precisely because many of its regulars were actually “atomised” and alienated from one another, and the “community” could play itself out as bitching, argument and nastiness. Quelle surprise!
If I want to chat with friends physically located all round the country and the world, or even in different suburbs in Brissie, I’ll log onto Facebook. I’ve made some new ones I enjoy having a drink with offline. I see my Facebook friends as a set of concentric circles - sometimes old “real life” friends are at the centre, but sometimes new blogosphere ones are, and the two circles overlap.
I’m also sceptical of this claim:
The second important point is that the rise of such networking websites changes, or expands, the very meaning of the word ‘friends’. For very obviously, all the people listed on your SN site as ‘friends’ aren’t that in the sense we now know it – of another person having the status which has some claim on your loyalties, obligations, etc.
Now, there would be some interest in analysing the degree to which “friendship” may have changed in its meaning recently, and I’m sure it has - though there’s a lot of research suggesting that ties of friendship are now more important than they were for a time (they were also very important at other periods of history), and persist longer and more meaningfully beyond the formerly compulsory life stage of nuclear family formation. And here, surely, social networking is just mirroring a real social shift, and facilitating its extension, rather than devaluing some essence of the “friend”.
But perhaps Rundle wants to intone the words Montaigne attributed to Aristotle - Oh my friends! There is no friend!, though in light of the origins of his own intellectual tradition in internationalist socialism, it’s odd that he should not see that there are ever increasing numbers of people who can justly make a claim on our affections and if not, at least on our sympathies and on our respect as an interlocutor. I’d have thought that was a good thing.
But maybe that’s just me. But I don’t think so. I know I have friends, who justly have a claim on my attention and opinion, who agree.
My interest is in reaching out further, not finding some magazine column or pedestal from which I can lecture an “audience”. Perhaps if Rundle took the plunge, he might discover something valuable.
A long time ago, we had a debate with Daniel Donahoo on LP. Donahoo had made similar complaints about online atomisation and inauthenticity to Rundle’s. But he was prepared to sit down with us at the table, as it were, and have a yarn about it, and I think at the end of the day, changed his view somewhat.
Anyway, I’d like to take this opportunity to blow kisses to all my wonderful Facebook friends. I, for my part, love you all.
And many of you know we’ve already had this debate - in Rundle’s absence, of course - (where else?) at Facebook.
Great post, Mark.
Many friends I’d normally only see on Weekends are present in my ’status’ feeds on Facebook. It’s not directly reciprocal like traditional net mediums, but it means I learn an awful from the few words that are posted. Are they making a serious point? Is it merely descriptive of their surroundings or plans to attend an event? What’s not said can reveal an awful lot too. Of course, whether there’s a certain novelty to this that will wear thin remains to be seen. I think the sheer proportion of my social network on crackbook will mean that process could be a very very lengthy one.
Very good once again Mark. You should reprise some of this stuff for Crikey.
Tried, SL, didn’t run. I suspect Rundle’s piece was a bit of filler and didn’t really warrant extended debate.
And thanks, folks.
Huh!!? You sure you meant “offline” there?
” but it means I learn an awful from the few words that are posted.”
Interesting expansion on that point here.
Personally, I’m just so jaded and jacked out by all the online friend/acquaintence site alerts (”Buggins has just made you a friend on Facebook! Click here to respond!” and all those fucking fone/email/rss/sms rings, dings and alerts etcetra - all insinuating and/or demanding a response to a swathe of com-candy junkies, most of whom you couldn’t be arsed even calling on the telephone.
I reckon this whole Web 2.0 social networking thing is just gonna end up as the next dot com bubble. Not to say that the market winners after the eventual shakeout will not still be patronised. But there does seem to be a lot of hype around now that doesn’t seem to translate into long term business models. Has anyone here actually clicked through a My Space or Face Book-hosted ad?
If I really wanna get a serious response out of someone I’m serious about getting a serious response from (eg: former, current and potential lovers and folks that can really leverage my intellectual property), I use a fountain pen to inscribe my message in fairly decent cursive on a nice paper stock and despatch the missive in a hand addressed envelope with a real stamp.
It’s actually quite fun to do too (I have a shower and shave, put the computer to sleep and some good music on (eg: Sinatra, Bruckner or The Happy Mondays), pour one big mofo single malt, recharge the fountain pen and commence with a few blobby drafts on the back of my credit card statements until the pen and sentiments are properly run in.
I have never not had a reply when engaging with people like this. Well except for that rather tipsy communique to Stanley Kubrick on realising “Eyes Wide Shut’ was crap. I’m sure though he’ll get back to me eventually.
I bet when you too all look through your mail, a plump hand-addressed letter with a real stamp really leaps out at you amongst the scowling little bill windows and misprinted “To The Resident” stickers.
“I’m surrounded by actually atomised individuals largely focussed on playing the pokies or picking up or picking a fight or picking a winner in the sixth at Randwick, boring the barmaid to tears, or playing pool with their mates and guess what, no one else is invited.”
Move to a better local then. Or Melbourne. We still do have some decent drinking spots here, free of gambling devices, full of ongoing narratives and up for some cross-generational banter over a cleansing ale or two.
Boring the barmaid to tears is of course a standard feature in any licensed hostelry, anywhere, and regardless of demographics.
Maybe trying writing her an apology cum mash note with real ink on thick paper.
Percy’s is still going strong then?
Actually, if Percy’s is the criterion then I prefer Facebook. You meet a much better class of person.
Fuck my perfumed and periwigged marmoset skin boots, you’re not talking about Percy’s at the Astor are you? If so, then there’s no talking to you.
‘Fraid so, though that was in another life. But I fear this puts me beyond the pale regardless; no marmoset-skin boots at the Astor that I can recall, just Dinny O’Hearn indulging in ritual humiliation of anyone stupid enough to fall for it, and Peter Craven holding court ditto.
Sound to me like you might even remember Stewart’s, of the disgusting sticky carpet.
Oh yeah, what a wanky skanky poetaster he was.
Still, look on the bright side. At least he died in the knowledge that he’d never written anything that would last beyond him.
If there’s anything wrong with narcissistic catblogging, I don’t wanna be right.
I googled “most popular australian political blog” and ended up here. I’m an American political junkie on his lunch hour. Anyway, I’m wondering what the hell happened to Australia. I remember running around the world and staying in youth hostels way back in my youth and always meeting progressive-minded Aussies. I just assumed Australia had a common-sense, progressive political climate. I figured the reality of global warming would only underscore that. I ignored Rupert Murdoch as an Australian fluke and never thought his influence might indicate that there was a large right-wing electorate in Australia. Lately though, I’ve been wondering about the Australian electorate. Is there really a large right-wing presence in the Australian electorate? If there is, does that mean there is an equivalent conservative political myth in Australia that trumpets rugged individualism and less government like we have in the US? Pardon my ignorance of Australian politics. It’s really atrocious.
In America, we had strange election problems occur when Database Technologies (DBT) got involved with compiling a felons list in Florida (former felons are not allowed to vote in Florida). DBT reconfigured into a company called Checkpoint and Checkpoint has been involved in Mexican elections and France’s recent election, as far as I know. There are definitely voter fraud problems in the US and I suspect there might be problems developing in other countries. Are left-wing Australians suspicious of their own election process? I would edit this post, but I’m on my and just felt like going to Australia. By the way, who is Guy Rundle?
Well trip,
Firstly our current centre right government is still somewhat to the left of the Republicans while all our centre left state goverments are still somewhat left of the Democrats.
Despite increasingly desperate and ludicrious attempts by the right wing of the ruling federal party and their various media/think tank cheerleaders, the whole religion/sexuality/culture wars thang has never really caught on here as a serious election issue cum wedge.
It seems to be a big issue on some blogs and among some more vocal pundits but I think that’s just the rusty nail syndrome (ie and cf Barry Humphries: Life’s so easy and boring in Australia that some people go out and scratch themselves on rusty nails to give themselves something to pick at. Like more than a few of the threads here.) Mainstream Australia couldn’t give a shit.
Basically Australians are still hedonistic, lazy, pragmatic, skeptical and with a keen eye for bullshit. Most election campaigns here, federal and state, tend to revolve around hip pocket nerve stuff. For example the core message of our major centre right party at the last federal election was interest rates will go up faster under the other bastards. Yup, that was it. No big appeals to national myths, building a bridge to future or promises of delivering the Kingdom on earth for your kids, just “under us, your mortages will be cheaper to service.”
To sum up, we’re getting more and more like the US in election tactics but the things that seperate from the US like our much more pragmatic attitudes toward sex, religion and the role of Government (regardless of which party’s in power, they all end up as muddling through dirigistes) show no sign of abating.
In short, we’re still much more like Canada albeit with much nicer weather and much worse circumstances for our indigenous population.
trip and Nab, can we move election speculation to the designated Election Speculation thread please? This is one hell of a hijack of this thread.
Trip_ wonders, on your last paragraph, try here:
http://www.roadtosurfdom.com/2006/11/13/every-vote-is-sacred/
sorry tigtog (posted same time as you), agreed.
And oh yes, our Australian Electoral Commission seems to be a completely apolitical and trustworthy organisation with the motto “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and so understands we’re perfectly damn well happy with our pencil and paper during our moment of truth in the booth. Except when you want to mark below the line (Proportional Representation Voting for the Upper House) on a Senate ballot paper the size of a fucking table cloth.
Moi? Off topic?
Oh pfaff, pshaw and tant pis.
“We are not old men, we are not worried about petty morals.”
I do think that the infinitude of the electronic world can have destructive consequences to certain personality types, particularly those with obsessive traits and people without well developed self-control.
I do think that it tends to produce greater narcissism, as those people who are self-obsessed now have a radically expanded means with which to self-obsess.
Saying ‘it’s not the technology’ is like saying ‘it’s not the gun it’s the murderer’. This is true, but people who are disposed to undesirable behaviour are more likely to fall into it when they have a tool to make it easier and quicker. When something is continually available at your fingertips, it’s a temptation some people can’t resist.
Mark, should this read “online” rather than “offline”?
The internet provides another way to interact - while the mode of communication is different to face-to-face interaction, and probably allows less and/or different information to be communicated than in a face-to-face interaction (as does e-mail), websites such as Facebook provide another way to interact that did not previously exist.
People love to communicate. I don’t know why some people dislike particular modes of communication.
Nah, offline interaction just doesn’t stack up.
Thanks, though.
Leaving aside the military origins of the Intertubes, I don’t think the analogy holds. Guns are designed to kill people. The internet is designed to facilitate communication. Sure, some very poorly socialised individuals go nutsoid when given a keyboard that talks back as opposed to typing letters in dirty typewriter font to send to the Queen and the local newspaper, but why is it always the default position to focus on the negative with online interaction?
Thanks, Sacha, comments crossed.
@ David
“When something is continually available at your fingertips, it’s a temptation some people can’t resist.”
I think that happens. The opposite also occurs. When alcohol is banned for a particular segment of the population it often ends up becoming a sort of fetishized object- even after it’s made available.
Looks to me like a lot of the problem with most commentary about Web 2 (myspace, facebook, etc.) is that it invariably ends up positing a fallacious either/or argument:
EITHER you can have the traditional notion of friendship (real-life encounters with the ‘authentic’ communication they entail) OR you can have the “cold and non-reciprocal” online communication (with the “atomised society” that it supposedly entails).
This is bunkum, the two are necessarily overlapping adjuncts and privileging one over the other is missing the point entirely.
Like damn-near everyone else here, I’ve reconnected with old friends through online communities and made new friends (both real and virtual) through these same communities - as well as keeping in touch with current friends.
As for Australians having “a keen eye for bullshit”. Every nation on earth says that. Hell, even the Yankees say it. I’d be a bit skeptical of that - we’ve had the current gummint for the past how many years now? Surely that’s an argument against this keen eye.
Agreed, Jobby.
It’s a completely false dichotomy.
The sorts of issues David points to deserve analysis in their own right rather than being extrapolated to an argument that internet = bad because some people don’t use it well.
Does Facebook hate Guy Rundle?
Social networking can be as warm and as reciprocal as the individuals involved. To claim otherwise requires a determination to distance oneself from real human interaction out of real fear and a determination to dichotomise to the detriment of people’s experience which may scupper Rundle’s assertions. You know the type, every local has one.
By the way, in response to Nabs and Dr Cat, I have a *good* local as well as a *bad* local. The Alibi Room vs. the Brunswick. But that’s my point - I’m friendly with the bar staff at the first one, and will quite frequently have a chat to other punters, because it’s a bar that’s well designed for friendliness and social interaction as opposed to a pokie/gambling/cheap beer and steak palace. Some offline spaces for interaction are good value, others aren’t, but it doesn’t warrant the sort of sweeping dichotomisation and generalisation Rundle indulges in.
Oh, and of course, The Alibi Room is into social networking sites. It has its own myspace:
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=51237374
Exactly right Jooby. I suspect it’s also the equation Popular = Evil Capitalist Plot.
The notion of ‘Friends’ and Guys’ dissatisfaction with supposed Facebook friends made me wonder if the Facebook creators could consider renaming contacts as, ‘Fellow Travellers on the Interweb’.
As a longstanding fan of Guy’s work I’m a bit taken aback to see him knocking something he hasn’t tried. He used to have better standards of scholarship than that.
Well, I’m a fan too, Dr Cat. I really like a lot of what he writes and think he writes with a lot of insight. But I think he’s gone too far in terms of trying to be the Renaissance man cultural critic by writing about what he clearly doesn’t understand.
Well no one’s suggesting anything should be banned. What we need is an empirical sociological appraisal of it’s consequences - one that is neither narky reaction, nor technological Whig history.
It doesn’t matter what it’s designed to do. What we want to know is the consequences a technology has in a particular social context. By radically expanding the possibilities for spontaneous individual choice, it facilitates the evasion of healthy social controls that inhibit poorly socialised people from engaging in destructive behaviour.
The net radically expands people’s ability to take weirdness and obsessiveness. Previously, there was only a certain amount of time you could spend at the library, only a certain number of likeminded people you can find.
Sure the weird guy could write letters to newspapers. But he’d probably only have so many local papers to write to, and he’d probably get sick of it when he was never published. Now he find a whole community of other freaks that mutually reinforce each other’s beliefs. Now he can spend all his time looking for millions of articles on Google to augment his ‘research’.
By bringing infinitude into people’s bedroom’s, and by allowing them to spontaneously follow all their desires and evade social controls, I do think the net has world-historical social consequence, and many of these are negative.
I honestly don’t think you can say the default analysis is negative - the odd negative article is nothing compared to the uncritical adulation it routinely gets with a whole industry to market it. Sure some denunciations are tedious, but also tedious is the net cheer squad that says ‘oh they are just a stupid baby boomer’ every time someone points out a negative.
Guy Rundle hates facebook because he hates our way of life!
Nick - heh!
David, yes, but it seems to me that while calling for a balanced sociological analysis, your immediate focus shifts to the negative. As I suggested in the post and as I’ve said in my previous academic and other writing on online sociability, liberatory claims for the intertubes are usually overblown. My suspicion, in fact, is that most online interaction follows very similar patterns to those prevalent in the culture generally - so I’d certainly concede that online spaces have their own hierarchies, dissensus and indeed deviance. Though in many case the rules are different. But I still think your default response is to highlight the negatives. That’s not the only way of balancing and expressing scepticism towards Whig technological narratives.
Anyway, not that I place much faith in generational generalisations either, I don’t think Rundle is a boomer - I think he’s about the same age as me - Gen X. It’s not that I’m shitty with him for pointing out a negative - it’s that he gets basic factual things wrong, and recites and repeats unreflective stereotypes, and generally does a very bad job of cultural analysis about something he clearly hasn’t taken the trouble to understand.
Mark, I hadn’t thought about the Renaissance cultural critic stuff, but otherwise, yes, that’s what I meant. I first took up blogging myself because I was being expected to examine Honours theses about it and didn’t feel in any way competent to do so just from reading blogs (which I’d already been doing for some time). I didn’t feel in any position to make judgements about it without having a go myself — the same would be true of Facebook etc — and, having worked with him a bit and knowing what his standards are and who taught him, it surprises me that Guy does.
Not least because to my certain knowledge he’s both smart enough and intellectually well-trained enough (which most pundits are not) to know how easy it is to make a fool of yourself talking about stuff you don’t get.
Having said that, of course, I can see where Guy and the like-minded mates of mine who sneer at the whole ‘Friends’ schtick, and the whole ‘Dating’ schtick, and the shamelessly self-propagating nature of Facebook, and the values inherent in much of its content, are coming from. But like everything else in the post-keyboard world, it’s just a vector, not an evil in and of itself. Garbage in, garbage out, and ditto with good stuff.
Sorry, that long comment crossed with the last few. David, good points, and it does indeed bother me from time to time that my position on online activities is not all that different logically from ‘Guns don’t kill people, people kill people’, a slogan I abhor. Mark, from memory Guy is in his early 40s so possibly on the Boomer/X cusp.
Hey Mark, great post as always.
Will the criticisms of web 2.0 interaction never end? Even the people who have 1000 friends on myspazz understand who their REAL friends are, and it doesn’t change those interactions in the slightest.
I’m confounded by why so many people seem to be threatened by web 2.0 relationships. It’s not like they’ve stunted the way we interact in real life, they’ve just created an entirely new way to connect with people. Like many of the people on this thread, I’ve met great people online who’ve gone on to become really good friends in real life. Is there anything wrong with using the internet to expand your horizons when it comes to people. I emphatically say, ‘no’.
You might be interested in this video Mark: The Machine is Us/ing Us.
Nail on the head, Audrey, nail on the head. This is what I argue (fruitlessly as yet) to my very oldest, closest and web 2.0-phobic friends. The threat thing is understandable, but again it has its roots in willed ignorance of how these things work.
I agree with you Dr Cat re: becoming articulate with respect to certain media as a condition of evaluating them. In the case of Facebook, ‘friendship’ facilitates a number of positions to occupy in relation to other people, all under the category ‘Friends’. Because there are enough sites provided for different kinds of interaction and a whole lot of different kinds of relationships to be fostered, friendship takes on other potential meanings. You use particular applications with particular friends, you message some people directly for RL meetings, you share news or photos with others. For me, using the term ‘friends’ in the facebook sense oscillates between the ironic and the enthusiastic.
Understanding these kinds of nuances within the category ‘friends’ means being involved in this kind of interaction at some level, which is why the critique offered from outside can only go so far. As David suggests, we shouldn’t accept facebook uncritically, but then I don’t think its users necessarily do so either.
Mark
I think the positives of the internet are self-evident, and there is a whole industry to promote them.
If you want an extreme example of the ‘anything about goes providing it says the net’s good’ + condescension towards any negative opinion (could only come from an outmoded baby boomer), see Kath Albury on Difference of Opinion earlier this year. Seriously, she’d said some pretty ridiculous stuff. I’ve never seen blatantly one-sided, anti-empirical negativity expressed like this three cheers for the net performance.
David, I think Albury is strong on complicity as methodology. It means that some of the material she produces can be uncritical, but I think her work also has value in getting at the nuances of certain practices.
What was wrong with what she said on Difference of opinion?
I read the transcript and I can’t find anything particularly glaring.
“I think the positives of the internet are self-evident, and there is a whole industry to promote them.”
The positives of the internet are only self-evident to those partaking of them and the industry that promotes the benefits of the internet is, by and large, online.
The problem is largely that anything unknown generally appears scarey and potentially threatening, and this bias is generally accentuated by the mainstream media (internet predators, the lack of socalisation on the tubes, addicted to online gaming, pr0n, etc. etc.) In reaction, we have a gummint running about during pre-election period proselytising about ‘cleaning up the interwebs for nice Christian folk and their children … won’t somebody think of the children’. All of this ignoring the inherent freedom of the web - it’s uncensored nature is both its biggest drawcard and its biggest failing, but you can’t have one without the other.
and so on
Kath Albury was irrationally desperate to refute every example of negativity and make personal comments about the other people referring to their age. She brought up a completely irrelevant issue of gay marriage - you know, this is just another thing baby boomers don’t like. She also made absurd comparisons, like suggesting that youtube school bullying wasn’t a substantively new problem because she’s dug through historical archives and found some examples of militaries using images to humiliate soldiers. Wtf?
She persistly took isolated examples from the past as though they were refutation to the idea that the net causes new problem. This is absurd reasoning - practically everything has a precedent, the issue is radically changing scale.
Every ‘good’ community the internet helped bring together - eg. rural gay teenagers, she chalked up as a point for the internet. On every ‘bad’ community it helped bring together (bullies, pedos) she said ‘oh but that already’ existed. Well no crap, but the internet facilitated it’s expansion. Also you might not quite get her condescension and knee-jerk urge just to say “no” to every single thing her interlocutors said from a transcript.
Interesting topic, Mark. But I think you may have omitted some *key* inverted commas.
May I humbly suggest:
“intellectual” left
“cultural critic”
and
French ” ” “philosopher” ” ” Jacques Derrida “famously” …
au revoir,
Ambi
“Also you might not quite get her condescension and knee-jerk urge just to say “noâ€? to every single thing her interlocutors said from a transcript.”
Agreed, sure, the tone is absent. I do think there are some problems with Albury’s positions on many things, but I also think there is value in the way that her assumptions are borne out in her research. I don’t universally agree with her conclusions, but I support the impulse to avoid lapsing into the terms set by moral panic. There are risks associated with the positive spin - especially appropriation by private interests - and I think they are worth taking into account.
“but the internet facilitated it’s expansion”
I think your assumptions about scale here are interesting. How can you differentiate between the expanded instance of practices and their increased visibility? In the case of bullying, I seriously doubt that youtube has made it more ‘popular’. If anything, increased visibility should lead to more scrutiny of what goes on in playgrounds. It also means that perpetrators of violence can be more readily identified.
Oh man… everyone has always known school bullying goes on. Teachers are reporting that students are using youtube as a rallying tool for bullying. Even forgetting about the fact that this popularises it, it’s a social problem in that it significantly adds to the student’s trauma.
A ‘rallying tool’? Are we talking about bullying or violence in general? As for ‘popularising’: what does that mean? Once again, higher visibility does not mean endorsment. I was talking the other day to a former student of one of the schools where some of the recently reported videos originated, now in his 30s, and he described it as, basically, a constant battle in the playground between individuals and groups. That all happened long before youtube.
I certainly agree with you that there is a potential addition to victims trauma, and other possible negative effects, like escalation. But if there are images/video of violent acts being circulated then it also suggests the inverse possibility that the violence can be stopped, and its perpetrators identified. It makes an easier target for administrators and law enforcement. Affected students can be identified and given proper support and counselling. The technology is, at worst, ambivalent in its potential uses.
Ok… popularising…
There is a behaviouristic tendency in human beings - the more they see something the more it is normalised. That’s how cultures reproduce. That’s how marketing works - you show lots of people enjoying something and the people will unconsciously think ‘ohh people get fun from that … perhaps I might get fun from it as well’.
Of course, people can respond negatively if the message contradicts values into which they have already been socialised. But the problem with the internet is that it is getting children - and providing a countervailing force to the socialising mechanisms of traditional authority.
David, I can’t comment on Kath Albury’s views as I don’t make a habit of watching Difference of Opinion and I don’t have the time today to look at the transcript. However, again, it doesn’t mean that her view is representative. In addition, I see a distinction between uncritical net boosterism (in which there’s huge bucks which is no doubt why some people do it) and a careful sociological evaluation and mapping of the benefits. It seems to me you’re extrapolating a bit too much from a limited range of comments on the topic.
I don’t think I was extrapolating anything, and I wasn’t suggesting that Kath Albury was representative, rather merely pointing out that there are some pretty one-sided pro-net things as well. I wasn’t refering only to academics, I included industry marketing as well.
And that is certainly a risk associated with taking that intimate position as a way of approaching research: your justifications are prone to appropriation by interested parties. The risk on the other side is that your valid and critical concerns can feed into mass-mediated moral panic. Note I say ‘risk’. I don’t think that you are necessarily buying into the panic at all, David.
I’m not going to defend Albury any further from here because I do have some reservations of my own about her work, but I think that the polemical context in which you’ve encountered her thinking may have obscured some of its possible value.
I love the assumption that I’ve just encountered her thinking. I’ve read heaps of stuff from the porn and trash culture are great great great great Sydney Uni Lumby crowd.
I especially love it when they say oh look porn is fine because we did a survey of porn users and they say that had no problems with it. Personally I don’t think porn is generally a big problem, but that’s really lame social science.
Mark, it’s pretty clear, strangely enough, that Crikey’s position is the same as Rundle’s.
Today’s editorial in the email reads:
Oh for goodness’ sake.
So, Crikey=good, MySpace=bad?
Where’s Logic 101 when you need it?
Very odd, isn’t it?
David, I think there is value in doing qualitative research on media consumers as much as there is in examining content, production etc. I do think there’s a risk of veering towards uncritical populism, and I don’t take to all of Albury’s arguments or conclusions (or Lumby’s, for that matter). Having read plenty of the material, worked with some of the same people, and occasionally in the same department, I would say that I’m pretty much at the furthest remove in terms of my political and intellectual priorities. However, I still feel there is some value in the work, and I think that there are a number of ways in which it is contributing that other approaches and methodologies simply cannot do. I see it as an instance of complicity as methodology: there is a necessary compromise involved in gaining some of the insights it provides. I also think your simplifying somewhat on the porn material, but then I’d probably say that there is a certain amount of simplification/polemicisation in how they present that material as well.
Yes, I noticed that rather odd Crikey editorial.
David and Adam - can you take the discussion of Kath Albury to the open thread? I don’t think a general debate on the value and method of her and Lumby’s work is on topic here.
I’m being a lot sterner about the “on topic” rule because it’s been pointed out to me by a number of LP Facebook members that long discussions which arise out of a segue carried on by one or two commenters discourage others who comment rarely from discussing the actual topic of the post.
Oh, and thanks, Audrey, and like Dr Cat, I think you’ve nailed it.
I agree that we’re drifting, Mark, but my arguments are related to the Rundle piece. In particular, the concept of ‘complicity as methodology’ in relation to media research speaks directly to Rundle’s failure to adequately engage with facebook. However, point taken re: Albury et al, so I’ll leave off of that.
That’s fine, Adam, but please do ensure it tacks closer to the topic.
Back to Crikey’s denigration of MySpace users: they quote a figure which demonstrates that MySpace users spend an average whopping three minutes per day on the site and say “get a life’?
We don’t even know which “average” Crikey is referring to - mean, median or mode - because the editorial writer doesn’t have the statistical literacy to know that it matters to supply it.
An article in the Atlantic a couple of months ago featured the author picking out a school girl to stalk via Facebook. Of course, she’d been a teacher at the girls school sometime previously, so was able to join the network, but with what should have been by that time an invalid email address. That the girl’s profile included enough photos and information to make her identifiable on campus and even trackable to her home was, naturally enough, presented as worrying. So just how easy is it to join a network without actually ‘making friends’?
Anyway, I’m bringing the cat to the pub this weekend to see if his prettiness will help me break through the isolation of watching the rugby with the bored barmaids, and then I’ll add more books to my virual bookshelf so I can crash the leaderboard. Woohoo!
Greg, this is where parental monitoring comes into it, and where if parents aren’t net-savvy themselves they need to know how to find advice from someone who is. One of the big ones is: kids do not need to have a computer in their bedroom. Our family computers are in the family room.
Social networking sites have their own privacy options which should be enabled by minors, as well as other rudimentary social precautions. I don’t have my street address on my Facebook page, and kids need to be trained that they don’t need to do that either. I have made sure that my minor family members do the same.
As to simply being on the same network, the “friends” request would still have to be approved, and that’s where kids need to be trained to show caution. I can understand how daunting all this can seem to parents with no net-clue, but there are simple, common-sense precautions that can be taken.
More sterling analysis from the overpriced email newsletter. I happen to know one professional musician and she and her friends use MySpace as a forum for exhibiting their latest musical creations and networking with other fellow musicians. There’s more to these sites than teenage diaries.
Let me just assure people that I’ve drawn these concerns, which I think are valid, to the attention of the Crikey editorial team.
“one professional musician and she and her friends use MySpace as a forum for exhibiting their latest musical creations and networking with other fellow musicians.”
I seem to recall that that was its original purpose; MySpace was created by and for musicians, and then everybody else glommed on. Presumably because musicians are so kool.
Thanks Mark. Just when I was thinking about renewing my sub now with tax return money they go and shoot themselves in the foot.
Absolutely, jpz. A lot of bands find support acts on MySpace. In fact, most of the gigs I’ve been to recently have come about that way.
Doesn’t make me any more inclined to subscribe to Crikey, I must say.
Mark
Your response might have been more likely to get a run in Crikey if youd replied to Rundle’s arguments, rather than a fantasy of them.
For a start, you imply that Rundle is attributing all this atomisation to ‘capitalism’, when the word is not used in the article, and the argument seems to be that technology per se is one of the main drivers of individualisation.
You also haven’t acknowledged Rundle’s structural point - that the meaning of the term ‘friend’ is being transformed by the idea that tenuous online connections constitute a friendship (as well as genuine friendships being carried on the net).
You parade the tired old excuse for an argument that people who have a critical view of technological developments simply don’t understand them - as if any technological development is so obviously wonderful that any critical attitude must imply incomprehension of it.
You seem to commit a bit of an own goal by your negative and somewhat bitter view of your local pub - won’t they let you play pool with them? Is that why you went online in the first place.
As for the idea that writing for Crikey (are there two Mark Bahnischs or what?) is putting yourself on a pedestal, while running your own vanity blog is somehow part of the conversation….please.
Plenty to criticise in the original article but you were too defensive to come to grips with the arguments in it
Oh no! Revenge of the Elbow (and stump?) Touchers!
Personally, I thought these blokes had a more persuasive anti-Farcebook argument.
Alvar Wave, does the word ‘projection’ mean anything to you?
Hmm, let’s see if this criticism is valid.
Where do social networking sites come from? Aren’t they profit making businesses? And isn’t Rundle’s politics well known?
Yes, he has. See this para:
But Rundle makes several elementary errors of fact which if he’d used Facebook, or researched it, he wouldn’t. So he writes about it without understanding.
Cheap shot. “Bloggers are sad nerds” argument. Addressed in comments by Mark anyway, where he talks about the local he likes going to, and the local he doesn’t. You’d need a peg on your nose to like the Brunswick.
“Vanity blog”? WTF? And all Mark’s Crikey articles are posted here where people can talk about them, and converse, and he’ll converse back.
Nothing to see here. Move on.
Guy Rundle is a friend, and I think he’s brilliant, but there is no doubt he has a tendency to jump to comment on things he doesn’t know much about.
I’m not on facebook, basically because I spend too much of my time on blogs like this one and I figure if I join Facebook it will absorb even more of my life (I don’t know how some of you do it). However, I’ve watched younger acquaintances use it, and its quite clear to me that it is deepening at least some of their offline friendships as well as building others.
I do worry a little about the cheapening of the word “friend”, but I actually think the problem here is that we lack more subtle differentiation than the three we have - friends, acquaintances and enemies. I’ve had a few occasions where I have told amusing or relevant stories about people I know where I’ve said “a friend of mine did…” and thought “are they really a friend?” The problem is that “someone I know…” or “an acquaintance..” just sound silly. But the poverty of the English language in this zone is hardly Facebook’s fault.
I saw a superb example of this when the editors of a student newspaper put a poster on the front of their office with amusing things people have said in the office. One piece refers to a bunch of people hoeing into the office pizzas. One editor said “they’re our friends” the other reproved her arguing they were not. The first one responded, “Yeah, they’re acquaintances, but not the kind of acquaintances you’d starve.”
I thought that was beautiful - clearly we need a word for “the sort of acquaintances you wouldn’t starve”. Perhaps Guy wouldn’t be so worried if Facebook users had 900 people in that category and a few dozen friends.
I don’t know about the English language, it just depends what kind of party it is, feral sparrowhawk. If they’re semi-strangers eating