Stephen Jenkins's List: Facebook

• Kevin Benard, 28,a real estate agent, said the initial treatment of Mr. Strauss-Kahn had given the impression that he was guilty before the investigation had even begun. “America has a very harsh justice system,” he said. “We believe in people being innocent before they are proven guilty, and not the other way round.”

• What is "social networking"? For all the vagueness of the term, which now seems to encompass everything we do with other people online, it is usually associated with three basic activities: the creation of a personal Web page, or "profile," that will serve as a surrogate home for the self; a trip to a kind of virtual agora, where, along with amusedly studying passersby, you can take a stroll through the ghost town of acquaintanceships past, looking up every person who's crossed your path and whose name you can remember; and finally, a chance to remove the digital barrier and reveal yourself to the unsuspecting subjects of your gaze by, as we have learned to put it with the Internet's peculiar eagerness for deforming our language, "friending" them, i.e., requesting that you be connected online in some way
• As Facebook expanded from colleges to the rest of the public, always retaining tight control over how every page appeared, the site's aesthetics thus began to seem less comparable to the dorm room design principle of in loco parentis and more akin to the authoritarian building codes of a planned community.
• Zuckerberg handed down each new redesign by assuring members that they would learn to appreciate the changes in time. As he reportedly bragged to employees last spring: "The most disruptive companies don't listen to their customers."

  • Robert Moses (December 18, 1888 – July 29, 1981) was the "master builder" of mid-20th century New York City, Long Island, and Westchester County, New York. As the shaper of a modern city, he is sometimes compared to Baron Haussmann of Second Empire Paris, and is one of the most polarizing figures in the history of urban planning in the United States. He changed shorelines, built bridges, tunnels and roadways, and transformed neighborhoods forever. His decisions favoring highways over public transit helped create the modern suburbs of Long Island and influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners who spread his philosophies across the nation.
• Although Zuckerberg is here parroting Clayton Christensen, the Harvard business professor who coined the term "disruptive innovation" to describe many technological changes, it's not hard to hear an echo of Robert Moses.

  • Robert Moses (December 18, 1888 – July 29, 1981) was the "master builder" of mid-20th century New York City, Long Island, and Westchester County, New York. As the shaper of a modern city, he is sometimes compared to Baron Haussmann of Second Empire Paris, and is one of the most polarizing figures in the history of urban planning in the United States. He changed shorelines, built bridges, tunnels and roadways, and transformed neighborhoods forever. His decisions favoring highways over public transit helped create the modern suburbs of Long Island and influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners who spread his philosophies across the nation.
• Once a commenter knows that a vitriolic statement will be shared with a large and personal social circle—appearing more like a letter to a small-town newspaper than an anonymous outburst—the typically venomous atmosphere of online comments, for example, may well diminish.
• What many find most enticing about Facebook is the steady stream of updates from "friends," new and old, which sociologists refer to as "ambient awareness.

• As the writer William Deresiewicz, by far the most eloquent critic of Facebook, recently argued in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

   

  We have turned [our friends] into an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud.... Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a feeling.
• It's true that Facebook can lead to a false sense of connection to faraway friends, since few members post about the true difficulties of their lives. But most of us still know, despite Facebook's abuse of what should be the holiest word in the language, that a News Feed full of constantly updating "friends," like a room full of chattering people, is no substitute for a conversation. I

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• What really interests me is the stories that older media (including television and the on-line versions of print media) tell about social networking, and the slightly nutty fervour that so often drives the telling.
• since all media are mixed in their cultural make-up and social uses, it behoves me as a student of history in popular culture to observe how the tales being told of new media at any given time draw on familiar generic and rhetorical reserves that help render change intelligible to us as a mode of continuity.
• • Metonymy: Reference to something or someone by naming one of its attributes. (from meta , "change" and onoma, "name").cf. Syndecdoch. Examples:The pen is mightier than the swordThe pen is an attribute of thoughts that are written with a pen; the sword is an attribute of military actionWe await word from the crown.
• journalists often draw on their rich professional reserves of reductively metonymic realism (‘setting the scene', the ‘character sketch') to cast social network users as types whose ways of acting are symptomatic or productive of diverse social ills: alongside terrorists and sexual predators there are always students uploading their mobile pics of boorishly drunken parties, ‘stupid girls' sharing every detail of their vapid daily routines, and workers who boast about bludging but forget that they've friended their boss. As in folklore, each of these figures is sustained by a dense field of concrete examples both stellar (Hugh Grant and Bono for Facebook party uploads, MySpace's Paris Hilton or Twitter's Ashton Kutcher for cosmic triviality) and ‘it-could-be-you' mundane (Kyle Doyle's ‘SICKIE WOO' Facebook status update).² Simultaneously grounded in and abstracted from the real history of on-line culture, such figures ‘stick' in media memory, powerfully eliciting recognition (the party animal, the princess, the slack worker) while drawing attention away from a myriad other practices thriving on the sites. Stereotypes are forms of apprehension rather than bad representations, and their force is to mobilize familiar knowledge to explain and absorb unfamiliar experience (Morris, Identity 143-44).

  • Excellent insightful paragraph.  bludging - 1 definition - Aimlessly lying about with no direct purpose in life.

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