Grizzling about Facebook notes
Posted on | November 27, 2008 | 5 Comments
These are my notes from Meaghan Morris’s talk earlier this month. They are very impressionistic, so please don’t take them to be accurate, i.e. quotable. If you were there please do amend and develop if you can and continue the conversation. I’ve left out a whole set of contextual references to William Gibson, Miranda Devine, Obama’s victory that week, etc. and just provided a basic frame of the talk for those who were keen to hear more.
Grizzling about FB
• part of a wider trend in media commentary where old media narrate the arrival and adoption of the new
• there is a shared concern in academic and media commentary around intimacy norming: particularly, an attachment to being able to control what a friend is
Grizzling
• Macquarie dictionary: “fretful complaint”
• a genre of popular social criticism
• to complain about something but to do so repeatedly, to go on and on
• makes the listener tired of hearing about it
• not whining or whinging; these are different charges
• contains a judgment
• grizzling isn’t weak, it’s irritating and therefore more powerful
• grizzling is Western
• Australian talkback radio: grizzling “at length”
FB’s appeal (social elites’ experience of FB)
• its combinatory force, multiple potentials
• a habitat, a lived environment
• ambient awareness
• temporal accumulation → depth
The problem with New Facebook: Removed FB applications from frontpage – removed memories. Moved it away from being a non-elite (scrapbook) form. Prior to this it had similarities with “an Irish house” full of “dust catchers”: where everything is kept because it has significance. There is a force to the objects accumulated, the debris of people’s lives (we have learned to think this is important for indigenous cultures but are less willing to see it in Western contexts)
Now the economy/desire for “an uncluttered page” is both corporate and American (the emphasis on “how I’m feeling”)
FB now much more like a big conglomerate – allows us to make history but in conditions not of our making.
Still, it can help users (social elites) understand their relationship to others and their place in a managerial class/community… This makes sense given where professional work is headed…. i.e. institutional oppression works by entering your head and making you feel terrible… FB is a (utopian?) positive space that alleviates some of the psychic/emotional abrasion of working in information labour (as if this is somehow less damaging than manual labour).
FB emerges at a moment when time is experienced as the medium of pressure, particularly for young people
Comments
5 Responses to “Grizzling about Facebook notes”
Leave a Reply
Currently consuming
Blogroll
- {im@ no jaz}
- A Wild Young Under Whimsy
- Adrian Miles
- ana australiana
- archive : s0metim3s
- Creativity/Machine
- Edu-Factory
- Event Mechanics
- Fifty Two Acts
- Geert Lovink
- How The University Works
- Life during wartime
- Making Wifi
- Marika Luders
- Mentalization-Positive
- Purse Lip Square Jaw
- SA Stories
- Silver in SF
- Snurblog
- Sorrow at Sills Bend
- Supervalent Thought
- Tama Leaver
- Tammi Jonas
- The Memes of Production
- The Vapour Trail
- Unemployed at last
November 27th, 2008 @ 2:19 pm
looks like a fascinating talk – thanks for the notes.
any chance it was recorded?
November 28th, 2008 @ 11:30 am
Hasn’t facebook always been about the lack of clutter, the “streamline” design especially compared to myspace? The early days of the ‘book were constantly about how you couldn’t personalise the background, there were no widgets or very few that could clutter the page, there was no music, etc. The development of applications was seen as a way to attract myspace users, etc. The new facebook then is just a return to the original concept, but now integrated even further.
November 28th, 2008 @ 3:16 pm
No recording David (hi! nice to see you here) but I can try to find out if there is a draft to pass on.
Meanwhile yes Graham, some of the early take-up commentary focussed on the aesthetics of FB and its appeal for a more professional demographic – Jason called it the ‘digital white flight’ to FB if I remember rightly.
Something we touched on in discussion after the talk was how FB is also eerily quiet compared to MySpace. It not only lacks music as a unifying experience but also talking smileys, etc. This to me speaks of its take-up by the workplace user who isn’t likely to want to disturb cubicle mates…(or to be outed as a regular FB user!)
But the backlash against the new FB is partly a case of the platform having lost the ability to interpellate an ideal user – and the shift from a small business model to a multinational experience. I think Meaghan’s observations of the HK and Australian modes of engagement help reveal how drearily pragmatic the young college boy entrepreneur’s imaginary always was. At least in so far as it shows some of the ways technology is used by non-Americans to express affection on top of – as a crucial further step beyond – the connectivity imperative. Affect trumps content…
December 1st, 2008 @ 8:30 am
That sounds really interesting. I’d be interested in reading a draft as well.
December 8th, 2008 @ 1:20 pm
I have a draft of the talk now, but it is only handwritten notes. Meaghan will be writing a version for publication in coming months, so I’ll keep you updated.
Another key point I forgot to mention was how ‘grizzling about Facebook’ is a constitutive feature of being on Facebook, particularly since the change in layout. This is the added dimension to the argument about how people are making history using this platform, but not in conditions of their making…