When i first joined, i had a healthy degree of skepticism as to what it was all about and what sort of people i wanted to have access to the information that i posted on it. At some point, i changed that philosophy and started allowing everyone and anyone to be my facebook friend regardless of their context to see what sort of effect that would have on me and the sort of interactions i have and people have with me.

What i think i’ve discovered after now having over 600 friends and two or so years of facebook interactions is that the interaction level on facebook feels like the equivalent of “people window shopping”. In my head i break it down into some rough subcategories: on the first tier, you’re skimming past someone’s status update or quiz result and while you may acknowledge that that stuff has passed by, once it passes by you don’t give it another thought. On the second tier, you may “glance at something interesting in the window” because a particular status or photo or whatnot catches your eye. And that might spurn a “like” or a comment or something similar. On the third tier, you may actually “walk into the store” either because something resonates with you or the person that posts it may be close enough to you as an actual Friend that it warrants you becoming more invested in it.

The analogy is far from perfect, but it hits upon my main point which is that in all of that process in shopping, you’re not actually committing yourself to anything concrete, you’re not making an actual purchase. Facebook equivalent interactions can seem to me to be similarly unreal, usually nothing more than a sophisticated version of giving a passing “hello” when you see a stranger or a casual friend on the street, or judging an entire song by the iTunes 20 second preview before you buy. Not that more meaningful interactions or friendships *can’t* exist on facebook, but the facebook paradigm doesn’t lend itself to doing that very well; most deeper level interactions on facebook happen outside of the facebook context.

Compare this to Livejournal or blogging networks in general where there are several people who i met first on livejournal and can now state “i love you” to even though i still have yet to meet some of them in person, how many people i care about enough that i would drop anything to help them out if they needed me.

Not that this is anything mind-blowingly new. My previous facebook ramblings concluded no differently that facebook functions merely as a touchpoint of greater human interaction rather than be the end of it. But the degree of that mentality needs to be retracted some, because my criticism of facebook and my promotion of livejournal is too black and white. Livejournal serves as a better tool for getting into someone’s head, but a) an LJer may decide to not treat it that way because even behind a friends lock, a journal can be too public, and b) with as many people and communities that i try to keep up with on a daily basis, i fall victim to skimming through entries as opposed to properly reading them which turns any potential deeper level interaction into nothing different than a facebook interaction.

On the flipside of this, i have to also acknowledge in facebook’s defense that depending on the user, a continual flurry of status updates/commentary/notes can give you at least enough of a surface-level bigger picture of what a person is to have the potential (if all parties are willing) to be that spark that leads to a deeper level of interaction that could turn into something more meaningful and permanent. I never would have imagined that there i would meet people on facebook that i would learn to care about in the way that i care about people, and while it’s rare, it’s definitely present.

All of this introspection leads to to a more established stabilization to my particular approach to facebook both as an observer and a contributor. A lot of it has to do with shaping my use of facebook in a way that best serves my purpose, and keeping perspective about what sorts of interactions hold what degree of value.

From an observer perspective, what this means is that i do my best to minimize the amount of pollution and unnecessary distraction that facebook offers and focus my energies on the aspects of facebook that are important to me. So i use no applications other than photos and notes; occasionally the Biggest Brain and Prolific out of nostalgia. I never turn on facebook chat because i stopped IMing a long time ago and have no desire to ever return to it with a few notable exceptions.

In reality, what i care about the most is status updates (and to a lesser degree photos and notes), and in this regard, the newest facebook app on the iPhone shines over facebook.com because unlike facebook.com, you can filter the news feed on the iPhone app to show just status updates and nothing else with no effort or complicated app blocking, &c.

Granted, the problem that can arise with status updates is that i as an observer don’t control how people choose to use status updates, and thus i can get a lot of information that i don’t want. What i care about the most has more to do with what the actual People are about, whether it’s their daily life stuff or what goes through their head. What i don’t care about is getting a sports update or a celebrity update or other similar sorts of things that i could get on my own if i wanted to. Not that i don’t appreciate the enthusiasm because there are certain things that i can get that Fandom about, but once i understand someone’s enthusiasm for it once or twice which adds to the picture of who they are, i’m not interested in it anymore unless there’s something more personal about it (such as photos of going to see the game live or a unique perspective).

Additionally, celebrity gossip/lives is something i care nothing about and used to stay blissfully ignorant of, but facebook has now made that pretty impossible. Very recently there seemed to be some sort of controversy surrounding Kanye West and the VMA awards (ATM machine? TUMB Marching Band?). I have no idea what actually happened (nor do i care to know), but it still bothers me that i know about it at all due to facebook statuses being a conduit for public reaction.

But i take the bad with the good and i can’t begrudge individuals for using their facebook in this way because it’s stuff that they care about or feel like reacting to, and that’s exactly what facebook is designed for. And so long as i have a medium in which i can get some bigger picture of what some people are all about, that still has some value, yes?

The potential problem/danger with that comes out when we shift the discussion to me as a contributor versus an observer and brings back the surface-level bigger picture versus deeper-level bigger picture discussion. As i was recently thinking more about how i choose to divulge information on facebook, i realized how i generally attempt to filter what i post to have nothing to do with (for lack of a better term) my soul, not necessarily because of facebook itself, but because of just how public facebook is. I have potentailly over 600 people looking at the stuff i write on facebook and that ranges from acquaintances, peers, close friends, students, teachers, superiors, subordinates, both past and present and future. put that way, it’s obvious how stupid it is to share anything that i deem as Truly Personal, and as that realization became more clear, i made a recent conscious choice to filter my contributions to facebook even further, and not ever post anything that truly defines my inner self. I went so far as to remove my “relationship status” and my “political views” from my profile as a personal stance against that sort of information having any play in my facebook universe. That doesn’t mean that facebook puts out a false impression of who i am; what i post on facebook is still Me, but only a particular facet of me, one that i carefully control.

(Tangentially, coming to this realization made me think that this must be what celebrities feel like all of the time, and that gave me a small epiphany that maybe that’s a part of the facebook appeal; in a way, it makes everyone a celebrity in their own context, and is thus a platform for people to feel like they have a high degree of importance. Which isn’t necessarily untrue; that’s a discussion for a future post.)

Now, i say that this is a *potential* problem/danger because i feel that it only arises based on individual perception. Surely a majority of facebook users employ a similar philosophy to their facebook usage whether consciously or sub-consciously, so as long as people grok that and don’t misconstrue certain kinds of interactions or lack of interactions as having any Real Meaning, then there’s no problem, right?

Except that this then brings up another level of a discussion: a) how much more of that surface level interaction we’re exposed to versus the pre-myspace/facebook/twitter era, and b) the attitude that can arise from the support of the facebook paradigm that this level of interaction is enough to clear a moral social conscience.

more on that in part two.

originally posted on darkblog resonate. i prefer any commentary or thoughts there.

since then, i’ve been much more open about letting any random high school acquiantance or former friend into my… “facebook life” as a self-psychological experiment, which is too complicated to get into with this entry. And since i’ve started doing this, a particular line of thinking has come into my brain having to do with the difference between facebook users of my high school/college generation versus the current high school/college generation.

For me, seeing these faces come back onto my radar in little snippets slowly but continuously feels like a very time-stretched version of the 10-year or 20-year high school reunion – and those sort of reunions have always seemed odd to me. After high school, i don’t hear anything from some of these people and then a decade later, the fact that we went to the same high school and maybe had passing conversations in the hall or were in classes together during a highly developmental time in our lives is supposed to be some sort of relevant “common ground” to shake hands?

One thing that facebook has taught me about this is that at least in an online concept, going through that is not merely not as painful as i thought it would be, it’s actually fun. i’m so fascinated with people and their experiences in general that any excuse to see where people are in their lives and the direction their paths take is awesome and valuable even if they’re strangers, so having some background on even casual acquaintances and where they are now is fascinating. But with some people, i scratch my head as to why they would be interested in anything about *me*; in my head, i’d be thinking, “who are you again?”, or “didn’t we talk maybe twice in the whole time we were in high school?”, or “didn’t you think i was a total loser?”

granted, again, all of us are in different places than we were, and so maybe the reinteraction is a reflection of that.

I’m tangenting again. The point is, people who use fb that are in high school and college now will never have that “stretched out 10-year reunion” sort of feeling. Facebook takes away that potential whether negative or positive to link to a past that was forgotten because facebook makes it much more difficult to create a true “past”. Ten years from now, they’re not going to be suddenly contacted and friended by people that they haven’t heard from in all that time since high school/college. Instead, ten years from now, they would have been casually reading through ten years of status updates, and casually looking at ten years of photos.

i feel like there’s a significant long-term implication about that, and i’m not quite sure what it is. Maybe just that people who are a part of the current fb generation get more of a blur between what their past is to their present. The cynical side of me thinks that this can be problematic. i’m certainly not the same person now than i was in high school, and some of what i put into the past i want to keep in the past. Seeing how people are now after the decade gap is fine because i see them more the way they are now and how they’ve changed, so they don’t feel as much a part of my past as much as a different form and hybrid version of the present. But with people now, what happens when they change, when their lives meander down different paths and they don’t feel connected to the friends that seemed so important to them in those years? Do they defriend them on fb? ignore them?

And that’s another difference between the current internet generation versus the past non-internet generation: before, when people went their separate ways, it was more acceptable to fall out of contact simply because keeping in contact wasn’t an easy task. Now, even when people move to the other side of the world, the internet can keep them connected whether they want to or not, and there’s almost this internet social stigma, a pressure to not lose touch with people who they may only vaguely know or relate to. You defriend someone on facebook and it can cause drama and turn an anthill into a mountain. “why did she defriend me? are we not friends anymore? do i ask? what does it mean? do we no longer say hi when we pass in the hall? do i not call or invite her to a party if i come back into town visiting?” as if the concept of “friend” on facebook or LJ or anywhere in that “slice of life” paradigm actually is necessarily equivalent to a real friend.

For me, i still have a fairly clear understanding that fb is a mere touchpoint of what actual human interaction is supposed to be about. That said, i do accept it more than i used to because honestly it is kind of nice to see what people from my past are up to and how they’ve changed (or maybe it should be more accurate to say how they present themselves as changed). In the long run, though, it can still feel cheap, especially because since i’m not always the greatest at getting back to people nor sometimes being the most organized about important things, fb can make it seem like those shortcomings are amplified, and that may be somewhat true, but some of it is also sijmply that the more people i get exposed to on fb, the more my people energies can potentially get spread too thin.

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Originally posted on darkblog resonate.  I welcome any thoughts or comments there.

Even though i’m outside of that direct television advertising culture, i’m still affected by it. i’ve never watched even a snippet of “Survivor”, nor have i ever seen an advert for it, nor do i care to know anything about it given my general loathe of reality telly. Yet i know the basic premise, i understand that the idea of being “voted off the island” comes from it, and i know that the show typically runs on thursday nights – all from word of mouth. And that’s just one example out of millions of telly shows, products, people, etc that are not simply given to promote an immediate sell or immediate gain, it’s a process of immersion, a way of slowly shaping aspects of thought and behaviour.

When the internet started to rise in prominence, early advertising came in the form of large click-banners. Click banners at that time were very straightforward – billboard style advertising that when you clicked brought you to the site and also a) paid the company responsible for the banner ad based on number of clicks, and b) logged information on clicks to either generate new sorts of clicks or sold that click information to other companies to send you more banners or send you spam.

Over the years, banner advertising has evolved and become more sophisticated. Banners that are contextual, banners made in flash that can react to your mouse movements, google’s revolutionary contextual “ad words”. But all of those sorts of advancements still follow the same basic paradigm of “clicks turn into money. clicks will get people to my website.” What those advancements lack is the ability to do what telly adverts do over the long term: create a sense of immersion. Part of that has to do with the nature of the advertising, but part of it has to do with the fact that web surfers are now so used to identifying banners and ad words that they know how to filter it out to grab main content.

Enter facebook.

Facebook has, in my opinion, managed to evolve past the mere click-banner form of advertising. Sure, they still have the basic banner advert on the left hand side of the screen which is generally difficult to completely ignore because the adverts are smart in how they’re generated. But Facebook also has other avenues of advertising both obvious and subtle that aren’t meant to be true click-ads; they’re ads that help create that same sense of immersion that television had full reign of so long ago.

One: Sponsored ads that are intertwined with news feeds. Internet magazine and news sites try to do this too by posting part of an article, then showing some ad links, then continuing with the article. That kinda works, but in that context it’s typically pretty easy to quickly distinguish between what’s article and what’s advert. But aside from a subtle “Sponsored” tag, sponsored adverts in the news feeds look practically identical to regular news feeds making it harder to filter out the content without at least some absorption of the content.

Two: Gifts. When i first signed up on fb, i didn’t understand the concept of fb gifts, but it’s become clearer now that gifts are another form of immersion advertising. A lot of the time, the gifts may be generic virtual objects, but every now and again, fb will make a Brand into a gift – a 7-11 Slurpee on free slurpee day, a little “Wall-E” doll on the weekend of the release of the movie. And it’s clear that gifts are treated that way because while i can remove the gift application from my profile page, i can’t turn notifications off about them on my news feed page.

Three: Becoming a “Fan” There are certainly things that i’m a “fan” of that i like to share with someone else if i think they’d also be interested, but becoming and sharing that you’re a “fan” of something on facebook doesn’t feel like that as much as free immersion advertising instigated by the populace. I’m a fan of Einsturzende Neubaten. If i made that public using facebook’s “fan” concept, it appears on my friends’ News Feeds not just telling them that i’m a fan, but with a promotional picture, a category classification saying that they’re “musicians”, and how many other people on fb are fans of Einturzende. Having only a seed of infomation saying “Mendel Lee is a fan of Einsturzende” will generally either get people to say, “oh cool!” if they also like the music, or have people shrug it off if they have no idea what or who Einsturzende is. But by adding those extra snippets of information, those that don’t know anything about Einsturzende now do. Oh, it’s a band. Mendel likes cool music. And look how many fans there are! Maybe i should check them out. And again – intertwined in the news feeds like the sponsored ads and the gift notifications.

While facebook isn’t as important to me as livejournal for keeping in touch with people, i do go on there on a daily basis to play loose voyeur like everyone else and to play prolific and the biggest brain app, and i’m coming to realize that i am in some degree back in an immersion advertising setting. it’s tricky, and very clever on the part of facebook, and i’m not sure if there’s anything that can be done about it other than deactivating my account – but it’s too late for that. Maybe just the awareness of it will help dull the effects of it all. We’ll see how i feel about it in, say, a year.