viz. - Facebook

You Are What You Like: Buzzfeed vs. Joan Didion

Jenn Shapland — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 20:15:50 +0000

A particularly egregious fad has taken over my Facebook feed in the past month, and it’s one that many friends and loved ones have chosen to participate in. It’s the Buzzfeed quiz, and it’s actually not all that unlike any other internet personality quiz, versions of which have made the rounds since the early days of LiveJournal. Taking a Buzzfeed quiz and posting your results is similar to posting your Briggs-Meyers letters (INFJ), which tends to result in a steady stream of comments from friends who now realize to what extent they are (or aren’t at all) like you.

Only the quizzes from Buzzfeed, which I consider the Comic Sans of websites, are different, in a few important—and highly visual—ways. First, they are absurd. (What Sandwich Are You? What Muppet Are You? What “Mean Girls” Character Are You? What Arbitrary Thing Are You? (tagline: “Wanna be a thing? Come on, you know you do. Take this quiz!”) Slate even has a spin-off version of their own: What Buzzfeed Quiz Are You? All of which to say, I find it very hard not to comment on the post that says, “I am a PB&J Sandwich”: “First of all, no, you are not.”

Second, the questions that comprise these quizzes are each lists of objects (or people, characters, &c. that have been converted into objects by virtue of being listed as quiz answers): commercial websites, types of donuts, old TV shows, colors, consumer products, menu items from the Olive Garden, various other pop-cultural phenomena. Each of these lists is depicted as a grid of heinously colorful images, such that the categories the author has created can ossify into classifications. It follows the usual pattern of internet humor—author makes a generalization or assumption based on a combination of observable behavior and preferences, personal taste, and random brainstorming, then posits it as ascertainable and widely known and agreed-upon fact, so that the quiz-taker can easily navigate using nothing but his or her readiness to accept and be amused by this newly named and tacitly confirmed truism. If a reader disagrees with the categories or their components, he or she is simply not “getting” the joke. Because these quizzes are meant to be jokes, yes? They’re lighthearted, I hear you saying. Get a grip, Jenn!

Photo by Brigitte Lacombe, via New York Magazine

But there’s something else about them that bugs me, something that bugs me about every aspect of social media that comes to mind. When did what a person “is” turn into what a person “likes”? Clearly I’m not the first to say this (where is the Marx emoji when you need it?), but it bears consideration in the context of these quizzes. Somewhere along the way, internet and social media users became extremely comfortable categorizing their own personality according to their consumer preferences. It started with the profile that consisted of nothing more than your favorites: books, movies, TV shows. In the early days of Facebook, you could at least type in your own list; now, you’re pretty much required, by way of autofill, to choose from a given set of things. They make the standardization of these lists hard to work around. (Issues of gender and relationship status that arise from this fixity have been documented, widely.)

I read a fantastic piece of Joan Didion’s this week, a review of Woody Allen's movies that came out in 1979 (thanks, Chris Kaiser!). For me, reading it was a welcome deliverance from the endless stream of Woody Allen/Dylan Farrow analysis flooding the internet right now. (An important conversation to have, but there are very few opinions on it I actually want to hear.) Here’s what Didion observed, 35 years ago. In regards to Allen’s infamous list of things that make him want to stay alive, (“Groucho Marx,” “Willie Mays,” Mozart’s “Jupiter” symphony, Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education), she writes, “This list of Woody Allen’s is the ultimate consumer report, and the extent to which it has been quoted approvingly suggests a new class in America, a subworld of people rigid with apprehension that they will die wearing the wrong sneaker, naming the wrong symphony, preferring Madame Bovary.” I can’t help but hear echoes of this all over the social media-verse. I guess all we’re waiting on now is “Which Woody Allen character are you?”

Reading Crowdsourced Justice: The Case of Fitness SF

Laura Thain — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 22:46:37 +0000

Image Credit: Passive Aggressive Notes

Last Friday, the DWRL hosted an RSA webinar featuring Dr. Rita Raley, Associate Professor of English and the University of California Santa Barbara. The webinar, which was broadcast over Google Hangouts thanks to our audio/visual team here in the DWRL, encouraged interactivity via social media and generated a lively discussion. I wanted to follow up on Dr. Raley’s talk about tactical media as speculative practice with an example from this week’s headlines: the “hacking” of a San Francisco based gym’s website by the site designer himself.

Fitness SF contracted Frank Jonen, an independent web developer, to design their website in May of 2012. On February 15, after nine months of non-payment, Jonen took action by re-claiming the website he designed as a means to “out” Fitness SF for non-payment.

His letter alleged, in part, that “Fitness SF preferred to ignore our invoices instead of paying them” and that “[a]s a result [Fitness SF’s] is no longer operational.” Jonen might have left it at that. Instead, his letter issued a call to arms. Under the heading “Do you hear the people sing, who will not be paid again,” Jonen appealed to other freelancing developers, designers, and journalists, saying, “I am also writing this on the behalf of the tens of thousands of freelancers and small businesses out there facing larger corporations who can afford to starve them out. In the movie/visual effects business this is already prevalent. Large studios awarding work to smaller studios or freelancers in the hope they won't stand up to them when it comes to loads and loads of unpaid work.” Finally, in a call to action, Jonen made heavy gestures toward solidarity among “the little guys” of the digital world: “An injury to one is an injury to all of us. We need to make a stand against crooks like this. If you'd like to join us in this fight, cancel your gym memberships, post on their Facebook pages, Tweet about it or even pass this on to a journalist.”

Image Source: Twitter

Hundreds, if not thousands, of users did just that. The story was picked up by several online national news venues, as well as other kinds of digital media. A Passive-Aggressive Notes subscriber, for instance, submitted the letter as an artifact of her own experience.

Simultaneously, Fitness SF crafted their own response via Facebook.

Image source: Fitness SF Facebook page

As the negative press poured in, the page’s moderators could hardly delete comments as fast as they were posted. Rather than angering posters, those sympathetic to Jonen’s plight interpreted the move as Fitness SF’s white flag of surrender. In short, all of Fitness SF’s attempts to defend themselves were ill-received and rhetorically ineffective on the large scale. As a direct result of these ill-advised PR moves, Fitness SF’s Yelp ratings took a nosedive.

Image Source: Google Search for Yelp ratings

And what were commenter’s major grievances? The vast majority of the conversation’s participants expressed disgust at Fitness SF’s inability to handle a simple billing dispute privately and called the gym out for unprofessionalism and image mismanagement.

Image Source: Screen Captures from Facebook

More than one commenter expressed displeasure at the gym’s use of the word “hacker,” interpreting it as a sign of additional ineptitude.

Image Source: Screencaptures from Facebook

The vast majority of Jonen’s supporters aligned their interest with his through the language of commerce, whether or not they themselves openly identified as small-business owners negotiating an increasingly-corporatized world. Although Jonen’s complete letter makes significant gestures toward anti-capitalistic attitudes, his internet audience sanitizes these claims by identifying Fitness SF as a “rule-breaker” rather than an emblem of systemic disadvantage. In short, audiences saw the relationship between corporations and small businesses as characteristic, not a flaw, of modern capitalism, and defended common business practice as the chief arbitrator of such disagreement, rather than the source of it.

In staking such claims, audiences also tended to place their faith in the court of public opinion, rather than a court of law, as the ultimate arbitrator in such a case. The frequency of comments identifying a “public relations” blunder exhibit audience awareness of content manufactured exclusively to manipulate them and a distaste for instances in which corporations unsuccessfully do so. In a strange rhetorical twist, those who participated in the debate often cited Fitness SF’s public airing of grievance as the most egregious event in the conflict, ignoring the fact that it was actually Jonen’s letter that launched the dispute into the public sphere. Commenters sent a distinct message to corporations: “Don’t, as a rule, expose me to or consult me about your private disputes—I am not interested in an ethics of disclosure. But if you do, expect me to disagree with you.” Similarly, audiences were much more like to agree with an individual’s complaint against a faceless corporation when the individual, as Jonen did, unmasks himself. But from such internally inconsistent rhetoric, it seems such audiences can hardly be counted on to take action outside of digital environs; their activism begins and ends in a brief digital moment that claims “going viral” as its chief mode of social change.

Perhaps I might, in closing, examine the digital artifacts this brief flurry of activity leaves behind. The news articles might be permanently linked to the gym as a Google search result, but Facebook comments will either eventually become buried under new material (as Facebook is notoriously difficult to navigate chronologically) or perhaps deleted all together. The longest-standing artifact that testifies to the controversy’s existence is the reviews of the business itself, now permanently tainted by the reduced average the complaint has brought to review pages like Yelp, despite these kinds of comments and ratings being in clear violation of Yelp’s policies against hearsay (“We want to hear about your firsthand consumer experience, not what you heard from your co-worker or significant other. Try to tell your own story without resorting to broad generalizations and conclusory allegations”). It is no coincidence, then, that a site that operates on a logic of consumer empowerment and crowd-sourced value judgments to cloak business promotion in democratic election will probably testify longest of the freelancer’s struggle against corporate America.

For the Love of SF

Calliope — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 18:41:58 +0000

Image Credit: Facebook.com

About half of my Facebook friends live in the SF Bay Area, and out of everyone they are by far the most active posters. They're constantly touting political views, promoting their startups, recommending good reads, and most of all reminding everyone through pictures and status updates that they live in the "best" city in the country (Businessweek made it official with their city rankings for 2012). As a former resident of SF who once drank the Kool-Aid, it's hard not to sound bitter and hypocritical about the locals' enthusiasm. Who knows, maybe instead of Kool-aid, now I'm just sucking on sour grapes. Let me be clear: there's no reason why San Franciscans shouldn't love there city. It is indisputably one of the most beautiful urban centers in the country. Pastel-colored buildings decorate its famous hills, which look out over the Pacific ocean and the wrap-around bay. And it boasts world-class universities, progressive politics, and vibrant international communities, all of which attract a distinctly intellectual, liberal, and enterprising kind of person. Like I said, it makes perfect sense that SF residents love their city, and that they would want to share this pride through social media. Most of the time I’m grateful for their posts because they offer me a way to vicariously experience the beautiful and eclectic place where I came of age. But the pictures also consistently make me laugh, and I confess they increasingly make me groan. This post will explore why that is.

People who live in SF--and I'm not talking about newcomers--love to take pictures of the city's landmarks and breathtaking overlooks, and share them on Facebook. I understand the impulse to snap a photo of a lovely view; but to constantly share pictures of famous places as if no one had ever seen them before, raises some questions. How many longtime Manhattanites share personal photographs of the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty? I'd wager relatively few. Yet, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Marina, Coit Tower and the Ferry Building are all over my Facebook and Instagram feeds. None of my friends are particularly good photographers, either, so it's unclear why their pictures of these places would offer viewers a novel experience of them.

Image Credit: Facebook.com

But I'm coming at this from the wrong angle. These photos aren't being posted to indulge the viewer's sense of curiosity about San Francisco. They're being used as evidence for ethical appeals about the person who is posting them, evidence that these treasures are "in my backyard, and part of my everyday life"--proof that "I chose and can afford to live in the most celebrated city in America." The Facebook photos are also evidence of the person's immediate location, which has become a social commodity and a valuable asset to companies like Foursquare that trade in "check-ins." The picture above with its unassumingly assuming caption, "Golden Gate from the St. Francis yacht club," serves as evidence that the photographer was at a yacht club, whose proximity to the Golden Gate Bridge implies that it is an especially exclusive one.

Image Credit: Facebook.com

The caption for this snapshot of the Ferry Building and the distant East Bay uses an intentionally transparent form of understatement. The view from this Facebook user's office is anything but shabby, and the picture establishes that the photographer works high up in a building that must have an extraordinarily high rent.

Image Credit: Facebook.com

This user hits us with a 1-2 punch of SF-related imagery. Her profile picture features the iconic Golden Gate Bridge while the Ferry Building clock tower looms in the background. Her choice to surround herself, virtually, in loco-specific images indicates that her joyous hair-toss in the photograph expresses her feelings about the city.

Image Credit: Facebook.com

Here we have another enthusiast--let's call her the SF hugger--whose wide grin, we are led to conclude, is related to the cityscape behind her, which she gestures at with outspread arms. These kind of photos make me laugh and sigh irritatedly (if you allow that those two respitory events can happen at once). They attempt to suggest something about a person's life in a city--that it is free and joyful?--beyond the moment in which the photograph was taken. But this message is undercut by the incredibly staged and exaggerated aspect of the figure's pose.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is: Citizens of SF, we know you live in a beautiful city. It has been well-documented by thousands of instagramming yuppies before you. Your ethos is not enhanced by standing (or gesticulating wildly) in front of the city, whose skyline you have transformed into a status symbol, and the danger of posting photos like these is that your friends will rhetorically analyze you.

Panem et Circenses: The Hunger Games and Kony2012

David A. Harper — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 03:31:21 +0000

Image Credit: BookDrum.com

I suspect I was one of very few people thinking of the First Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Cooper, as I watched The Hunger Games with my family last weekend. In particular, I was recalling how Shaftesbury lamented in 1711 that the English theater had come to resemble the “popular circus or bear-garden.”

It is no wonder we hear such applause resounded on the victories of Almanzor, when the same parties had possibly no later than the day before bestowed their applause as freely on the victorious butcher, the hero of another stage, where amid various frays, bestial and human blood, promiscuous wounds and slaughter, [both sexes] are… pleased spectators, and sometimes not spectators only, but actors in the gladiatorian parts.[1]

I found myself watching The Hunger Games at the urgent behest of my eldest daughter, a staunch tween member of “Team Peeta.” Before the movie, we had made a bargain that I would read the entire Hunger Games series and take her to the film if she would read Golding’s Lord of the Flies. It seemed like a good deal at the time. While The Hunger Games movie didn’t put her in mind of Shaftesbury, she did direct me to the image below:

Image Credit: iFunny.mobi

Like the best jokes, this one works on several levels. Suzanne Collins, author of the Hunger Games series, makes the Roman “bread and circuses” connection explicit in the third novel when Katniss is informed that “in the Capitol, all they’ve known is Panem et Circenses.”[2] Indeed, “Panem” is the name of the fictional nation that uses the annual Hunger Games as a strategy of control. My initial assessment after reading the series was that Shirley Jackson’s famous 1948 short story “The Lottery” had mated with Stephen King’s prescient 1982 sci-fi novel The Running Man and produced dubious offspring. But I left the movie musing that it is somehow too easy to assess The Hunger Games as a commentary on a culture obsessed with cheap, voyeuristic reality TV. In a way the books never could, the movie takes advantage of the social and visual experience of going to the movies to breathe new life into the “bread and circuses” paradigm.

In an article for Huffington Post, Greg Garrett noted that The Hunger Game’s dystopia evokes both 1930’s Depression-era America and the Roman “bread and circuses” tradition. Garrett writes, “So long as we are distracted… we may forget for a moment about our own lives, our own hunger. We may forget that we live in a nation that is less free than it was a decade ago, a nation with fewer societal safety nets, a nation with fewer opportunities for young people.”[3] Well said. But let’s face it; the majority of Americans have never known anything more than metaphorical hunger. Turning our gaze toward our own very real problems is a start, but only a start. To do only that is to become a Panem Capitol dweller who realizes she lacks freedom. Breaking free of the thralldom imposed by our own enticing bread and circuses requires we turn our gaze outward and recognize responsibilities extending beyond the borders of self, town, state, or nation.

The theater where my family viewed The Hunger Games was a trendy one that serves meals during the show. While we waited for our group to be seated, the people in front of us consumed two pitchers of the theater’s own microbrew. Once inside, we were treated to a menu mimicking foods found in the books. No, not squirrel, berries, or any other survival food found in the impoverished districts or the arena. This was high-end Capitol fare, like lamb stew with plumbs and some purple melon wrapped in prosciutto. In typical American fashion, the portions were huge. All told, my family probably spent over $100.00 to sit in stadium seats watching a decadent society watch starving children kill each other for sport.

Image Credit: People.com

That purple prosciutto melon was a tip off to what sets The Hunger Games phenomenon apart. It casts the movie audience in the role of Panem Capitol dwellers watching the games. The effect is emphasized by how rarely the movie shows Capitol citizens reacting to the action in the arena. Instead, we stand in for that audience, watching the carnage directly or through the mediation of the charismatic game show host, Caesar. The outlandish Capitol fashion (think Eighteenth-century meets Lady Gaga) may be meant to distance these people from us, even dehumanize them, but as the movie rolls on we become them.

Shaftesbury recognized that the difference between being a “spectator” or an “actor” is perhaps only one of degree. The Hunger Games has us watch colonial children kill one another while we participate in our own consumer culture of excess. God forbid you were out refilling your eight-dollar popcorn tub and missed Thresh bashing little Clove’s head in against a giant metal cornucopia.

Image Credit: Netroots Foundation

The tricky thing about a movie about bread and circuses is that it can become simply another circus, particularly if the audience remains unaware of their complicity. What are we forgetting – what are we being distracted from – by this particular circus and by the more ubiquitous barrage of media white noise? I couldn’t help but reflect that only about a week prior to the release of The Hunger Games the viral social media campaign “Kony2012” had filled our feeds and prompted anxious articles in The Atlantic,[4] The New York Times,[5] ForiegnPolicy.com,[6] and in other mainstream media outlets. The rapidity with which critiques of Kony2012 surfaced revealed a deep mistrust for new social-media fueled activism, as well hinting at even less savory reasons for lashing out at the video.

For a moment, Kony2012 brought our attention to the plight of child soldiers, real starving children who kill one another. Of particular impact is the moment nine minutes into the film, where the filmmaker attempts to explain Joseph Kony to his own five-year old son. The moment has power precisely because, in order to expose the exploitation of children, the filmmaker exploits his own son. It is uncomfortable, but it is meant to be. When we watch fictional children fight in the Hunger Games arena, however, we are partaking in an entertaining diversion, both within the framework of the fiction that makes us a Capitol citizen, and in our role as real consumers of media. A little more discomfort might be in order.

Shaftesbury wasn’t arguing for the abolishment of the theater in 1711, no more than I am denying the value of entertainment. I study Renaissance and Eighteenth-century literature for most of my day, so for me to take such a stance would be absurd. But I do think we should reflect upon what it means to be identified not with the rebellious underdogs of District 11, but with the effete, privileged citizens of the Capitol who move from one distraction to the next as children kill each other and the temperature rises.

Works Cited

[1] Anthony Ashley Cooper. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Edited by Lawrence E. Klein. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 447.

[2] Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay. (New York: Scholastic, 2010), 223.

[3] Greg Garrett, "The Hunger Games: Why It Matters"

[4] Max Fisher, "The Soft Bigotry of Kony 2012"

[5] Josh Kron and J. David Goodman, "Online, a Distant Conflict Soars to Topic No.1"

[6] Joshua Keating, "Guest Post: Joseph Kony is not in Uganda (and other complicated things)

Coding Class Identity and Friendship in The Social Network

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:58:18 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Youtube

If you’re a member of the so-called “Facebook generation,” it’s probably been pretty hard to ignore the recent coverage of David Fincher’s The Social Network, the movie that purports to tell the story of Facebook’s founding in a Harvard dorm-room circa 2003-4. Websites like Jezebel have critiqued the movie’s treatment of women, writers on Slate have criticized the movie’s portrayal both of Harvard, and others have questioned whether it accurately represents the website's creator Mark Zuckerberg. When I saw the movie, I was more struck by the ways in which Sorkin uses conventional tropes of class and gender dynamics to ask questions about how Facebook has potentially rewritten these issues, as well as changing identity, social interaction, and the idea of the public sphere.

I’d like to decode here for viz in the ways in which it not only pictures a different kind of class warfare, but also helps visualize friendship in its competing images of Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Sean Parker, and the (fictional) Erica Albright.

For those of you who haven’t seen the movie yet, the story is pretty simple: Mark Zuckerberg, a borderline Asperger’s Harvard sophomore, is rejected both by his girlfriend Erica and the final clubs to which he longs to belong. When two WASP-y brothers, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, ask him to help them create a dating website called Harvard Connection, Zuckerberg decides to create a different website based around social interaction: “People want to go on the Internet and check out their friends, so why not build a website that offers that? … I’m talking about taking the whole social experience of college and putting it online.”

What follows is his quest to make this dream a reality, while fending off lawsuits from the Winklevoss twins and his co-founder/friend Eduardo.

The movie risks portraying Zuckerberg as unsympathetic, but watching the trailer above helps viewers find points of connection with him. As it begins, we see what look like screenshots from Facebook of its users sharing pictures of their tattoos, their parties, and their children, commenting on their friends’ profiles, overlaid by Scala and Kolacny Brothers’ cover of Radiohead’s “Creep.” These images eventually dissolve into a picture of the man who links all these profiles together, Mark Zuckerberg, who appears just as the vocal track angelically sings, “You’re so very special.” The juxtaposition of image and word here creates an eerie effect—the Facebook users and Mark are all linked through the lyrics that describe them:

I don’t care if it hurts,
I want to have control.
I want a perfect body,
I want a perfect soul.
I want you to notice,
when I'm not around.
You're so very special,
I wish I was special.

While perhaps this opening distinguishes between the users longing to be perfect and the “special” Zuckerberg, the rest of the trailer draws the two together. Zuckerberg here is presented as an outsider without real friends. The movie opens with him struggling to have a conversation with his girlfriend Erica; she has trouble keeping up with him as he jumps between topics:

However, the scene concludes when Erica finally gets mad at Mark for implying that she’s slept with the bar’s door guy and that she goes to an inferior school. Her words to him closing the scene, implies Sorkin, motivate Mark for the rest of the movie: “Listen. You’re going to be rich and successful. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a geek. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.” Viewers spend the rest of the movie following Mark and his actions, left to judge at the end along with Rashida Jones whether or not Mark is an asshole, or just trying to be one. Is Mark—and is the viewer with him—a creep? How are we to read Mark, and how is Mark left to read the social codes surrounding him?

Image Credit: Screenshot from The Social Network

The movie helps us do this in part through its costuming and visual rhetoric, setting Mark against both his friend Eduardo and the Winklevii. Mark dresses throughout the movie in something like a uniform: exchangeable grey hoodies or North Face black jackets, jeans or shorts, and ever-present t-shirts. His cluelessness about how to talk to Erica is visually mirrored by shots of him running through the snow in Adidas sport sandals, unaware of the cold. His hacker-mentality appears in the pajamas he wears to a meeting with a venture capital firm. His clothes mark him as young, but still advertise an educated background; he appears in Phillips Exeter Academy shirts several times (the prep school the real Zuckerberg did attend).

Image Credit: The Social Network

The Winklevoss twins, on the other hand, visually represent the traditional Harvard elite. They wear suits so dressy that Larry Summers jokes that they’re trying to sell him a Brooks Brothers franchise. Armie Hammer’s bland good looks complement both his pastel tie and the wood-paneled rooms of the Porcellian in which he stands. He looks like the kind of “gentleman of Harvard” that Cameron Winklevoss claims to be. While Zuckerberg has similarly elite connections that separate him from many of the movie’s viewers, the costumers make the Winklevoss twins look different enough to set up the binary between the two groups. Eduardo’s suits throughout hint that while he might want to be Mark’s friend, ultimately he’s closer to being the enemy.

This visual dynamic plays over into the characters’ interactions in the script: not just how the friends are visually portrayed, but the way in which The Social Network pictures friendship at large. Competing visions of friendship are offered by Mark, Eduardo, and Sean. Mark’s friendships with these two men play out homosocially (which helps explain why the women seem so unnecessary at times), and their abilities to relate to Mark drive the website’s development. When Eduardo first appears in the movie, he’s ready to comfort Mark after reading Mark’s LiveJournal entry that describes his breakup with Erica; what Mark wants from Eduardo isn’t emotional support, but the mathematical codes that will help him create the website Facemash.

As Eduardo is punched by the final club The Phoenix, Mark derides him at every turn in (apparent) envy at not being included. Eduardo’s vow to protect Mark from what he sees to be Sean’s bad influence leads him to sign the stock restructuring agreement that effectively phases him out of the company, ending his friendship with Mark. Yet Mark warns Eduardo that he might be left behind if he doesn’t come out to Palo Alto to help out with the company’s development there, a warning Eduardo fails to heed. Sean seduces Mark over drinks and a shared vision for the company, but he gets forced out when caught snorting coke off Facebook interns at the end of the film.

While the movie makes frequent use of classic Sedgwick’s homosocial triangles, the movie’s energy primarily emerges from Mark’s continued and ongoing attempts to keep a friendship with the one person in the movie who rejects him constantly: Erica Albright. At three points in the movie Mark confronts Erica with friendship on the line. When she breaks up with him, they have a heated exchange:

Erica: I think we should just be friends.
Mark: I don’t need friends.
Erica: I was being polite, I had no intention of being friends with you.

Mark here rejects the idea of needing friends, but when he spots her again in a bar he feels compelled to go up to her to try and have a conversation. She refuses to follow him, explaining, “I don’t want to be rude to my friends.” Finally, the movie closes with him finding her profile on Facebook and sending her a friend request; the screen fades to black on the image of him refreshing the page over and over to see if she’s responded yet. Mark has helped to redefine friendship through Facebook—where users call relative strangers and close companions alike “friends”—but the viewer is left to feel superior to Mark because the one friend he wants is the one he never can have.

Facebook allows its 500 million users to join groups, make friends, and establish a public identity for all to see, but it also creates the kinds of out-groups with which Mark identifies in the end. If Zuckerberg and Facebook potentially allow for the breaking down of certain kinds of class through technology, both also work to reify classes of users and non-users, people with access and those without. I think a part of the reason I left the movie feeling a bit disturbed was because while I might feel a certain schadenfreude in Mark’s failed friendships, by making friends with Facebook back in 2004 I helped to create the monster.

(Not that it stopped me from going home and posting my reaction to the movie on Facebook.)

Visual interfaces reinforce cultural stereotypes

John Jones — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 15:51:16 +0000

On Monday, the BBC reported on a “six-month research project” that revealed that “MySpace users tend to get a job after finishing high school rather than continue their education” while Facebook users “come from wealthier homes and are more likely to attend college.” In a Tuesday blog post, Clay Spinuzzi pointed out that the research project in question was not intended to be taken as scholarly research. While it is generally a good idea to take any BBC report on science with a Gibraltar-sized grain of salt, one should ask, why did so many others accept these results (Clay lists SmartMobs and BoingBoing as posting favorable comments)? I think the answer has more than a little to do with the visual aesthetics of the two sites.

Consider these screenshots, one from a Facebook profile and the other from MySpace:

The controlled layout of the Facebook group page is in stark contrast with the MySpace page’s repeating background and awkward grid (and this page isn’t even one of the worst MySpace offenders). I wouldn’t be surprised if the quick acceptace of Facebook and MySpace as being respectively high-brow and low-brow wasn’t in some part affected by differences like this one.

Facebook response to the Virginia Tech tragedy

John Jones — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 23:09:04 +0000

Following up on my post from yesterday, where I pointed out that Facebook originated as a way to display and comment on photos, Facebook has been a nexus of information about victims of the Virginia Tech shootings. The descriptions of 7 of the 15 victims listed on this page on NPR’s website contain references to Facebook memorial pages or have pictures that were acquired from Facebook accounts.

Facebook users have also generated a number of online memorials. Consider these images that I grabbed from the “Longhorns Commemorating the Virginia Tech Shooting” (requires login) group’s page:

source: Facebook

Homepage for the Facebook group “Longhorns Commemorating
the Virginia Tech Shooting”

source: Facebook

All images for the Facebook group “Longhorns Commemorating
the Virginia Tech Shooting”

It is interesting that, along with commemorative images, group members included a photo of the shooter, Cho Seung-Hui, and an image of the police storming one of the buildings on campus. While on the one hand the use of Facebook to post visual responses to the tragedy—in this case, a number of images associating the VT logo and the University of Texas logo—as well as comments associated with those visuals functions simply as remembrance, on the other, the images that users have chosen indicate a complicated response to the tragedy. Consider how out of place Seung-Hui’s image would be at a funeral for one of the victims, or a memorial service.

I think there are at least two possible reasons why these images were posted in this way. First, they are informative. The culture of Facebook is also the culture of the Internet, and one purpose of these memorial sites, like websites in general, is to provide information—about the victims, about memorial services, and about the shooter. Second, since commenting on images is a primary activity of Facebook users, I believe that once the shock of the event has worn off a bit, these images will be a place for people to post comments—reactions to the tragedy—just as the Facebook and MySpace pages of the victims will be ways for for friends and family to memorialize them.

The origin of Facebook

John Jones — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 20:42:11 +0000

Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion passes along this article from Fast Company profiling Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The ostensible point of the story is that Zuckerberg and co. have passed on some huge buyout opportunities—Yahoo apparently offered them $1 billion for the site—a move that is considered to be pretty risky. I, however, found the recitation of Facebook-founding lore to be the most interesting part of the piece.

by: Jonathan Sprauge

These men are rich: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg along with Dustin
Moskovitz and Matt Cohler

I thought it was particularly interesting that the article lists two precursors to the site: Facemash, a site that Zuckerberg set up on Harvard’s student database that compared pictures of students and asked people to vote for the hottest one, and a site he set up to allow fellow students in his art history course to add their notes as comments to a set of images from the Augustan period. One of the biggest social networking sites (which, you remember, is now worth about $1 billion), then, was founded on the desire to rank people by their looks and annotate images. Based on my limited usage of the site, it seems like these are still the primary uses of the site—uploading pictures (the article also mentions that ComScore ranks Facebook as the number one site on the Internet for photo-sharing, with 6 million uploads a day) and talking about them.

The apparent value of these images is in their ability to be discussed, to be placed in a context (an individual took them, that individual goes to a particular school, likes certain TV shows, and so on) which gives them meaning. Since people have been sharing photos for years, it is a little surprising to note that many of the latest web successes—MySpace, YouTube, flickr—have been, essentially, technologies for contextualizing and discussing images.