Flaws of Facebook column
by Alex
I have a new column on “The Flaws of Facebook”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/02/03/golub up at Inside Higher Ed, which is mostly about the reason that I don’t like to use Facebook.
I have a new column on “The Flaws of Facebook”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/02/03/golub up at Inside Higher Ed, which is mostly about the reason that I don’t like to use Facebook.
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Are you going to post it as a “note” to your FB account, in lieu of your “25 things about me”?
I suppose, considering that you’re writing for a premier magazine about higher education, that I shouldn’t find it surprising, but I did: one of the comments was by a college friend of mine who I don’t think you would know. It was just a little odd that I knew both the author and the commenter, who I don’t think know each other.
One difficulty with FB is that everyone has different ideas of who they should be “friends” with. In my case, I have no students nor is there anyone else for whom I am in a position of power over, and so my FB friends are more or less also friends in real life. But then all these different thresholds of friend have to mesh together under the same non-granular framework.
“I have no students nor is there anyone else for whom I am in a position of power over”
Yes, alas, you have only your man child to bend to the power of your will.
More seriously tho, even though some comments criticize me for not understanding that Facebook has some granularity in its permissions (I just didn’t want to go into details of the interface in what was supposed to be a color piece), they’re still pretty rudimentary. And of course the big issue is not the level of granularity but the fact that code disambiguates dsitinctly, however finely its distinctions are cast.
Well, it’ll be sixteen and a half years until FB lets Matthew have his own account. Although somehow I think between now and then many of the age restrictions for web stuff will get lifted.
It seems like part of the problem is that if you have an ever-growing list of FB-friends, then you have an ever-lowering real-life friendship threshold to be the basis of FB-friendship, and thus an ever-more restrictive set of things you’d want to post on FB. Then one might agonize whether you want you newest “friend” to see the stuff you posted months ago, way back when your FB-friends really were your real-life friends.
Which brings up two points: there seem to be some similarities with the FB problem and with the evolving nature of Golublog. Second, is there any cross-over between the question of real-life-versus-FB-friends and the sort of online communities you’re studying in WoW?