http://www.care2.com/causes/education/b ... nt-1307605
Facebook and Web 2.0 make you dumb?
Certainly there's been lots of speculation about the internet making us dumb (on Discovery magazine and at the Wall Street Journal). Facebook, with its apparent capacity for keeping us all connected and happy, might seem to be at least serving some sort of purpose, as far as, well, keeping us all connected and happy (if also lowering student GPAs).
Not so, says writer Zadie Smith in a recent essay in the New York Review of Books on Facebook, 'our new beloved interface with reality.' The problem (well, one problem) that she notes is that Facebook was designed by a Harvard sophomore with a Harvard sophomore’s preoccupations. What is your relationship status? (Choose one. There can be only one answer. People need to know.) Do you have a “life”? (Prove it. Post pictures.) Do you like the right sort of things? (Make a list. Things to like will include: movies, music, books and television, but not architecture, ideas, or plants.)
Writing in The Register, Andrew Orlowski offers one reason for the limitations of human interactions Web 2.0 style:
Web 2.0, like most of our software, was created by autistic people. Zuckerberg is autistic, and can’t see individuality, let alone understand it. So he can only understand what humans want through the hive mind. And by creating Facebook, he created a massive machine to help him figure it out.
Might Facebook and other forms of social media software be better termed 'the autistic network,' the title of Orlowski's article? In using such software, are we not so much presenting our real selves as some 2-dimensional representation of ourselves as an autistic person might understand things?
Such a claim presumes a lot, and a lot that is in itself very limited, and misleading not to mention incorrect, about autism and autistic persons. And indeed Smith's New York Review of Books essay does not at all reduce Facebook, or Mark Zuckerberg, to any neat or pat distillations (and she does not specifically mention autism). Reflecting on the movie The Social Network and, in particular, its portrayal of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Smith (who indeed notes that she quit Facebook about two months after joining it) considers what is actually known, or not, about him.
The real Zuckerberg is much more like his website, on each page of which, once upon a time (2004), he emblazoned the legend: A Mark Zuckerberg Production.Controlled but dull, bright and clean but uniformly plain, nonideological, affectless.
In Zuckerberg’s New Yorker profile it is revealed that his own Facebook page lists, among his interests, Minimalism, revolutions, and “eliminating desire.”
As Smith notes, 'life is turned into a database' for users of Facebook, who must '“reduce themselves” in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate.' Smith is quoting from You Are Not a Gadget, a book by 'master programmer and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier' in which the author wants us to be attentive to the software into which we are “locked in.” Is it really fulfilling our needs? Or are we reducing the needs we feel in order to convince ourselves that the software isn’t limited?
Come on: How often have you found yourself taking an abysmally long time to compose a 140-character Tweet that presents your wit and humanity perfectly, as you've synced your Twitter with your FB account and need to explain that your waiting in line for a cup of Starbucks exactly embodies the state of the universe for you at this moment?
Well, I'll admit I more or less do the above except, I never stand in line for Starbucks. I make my own coffee and, in all honesty, I don't like Starbucks---perhaps a useful fact to know if you might be in the (very unlikely) position of getting me coffee, but not information that, as far as I know, might be making anyone the wiser, better, etc..
As far as the notion of the limitations of what can be learned from the 'autistic network'; from some entity termed 'autistic.' I would be hard-pressed to introduce you to someone as distinctive and individual as my son Charlie, who is on the moderate to severe end of the autism spectrum. I certainly see glimmers of him in others on the autism spectrum, but I think it is accurate to sat that there is only one boy like ours.
And that the only way really to know him (or anyone) is via actual, real, interactions, face to face.
comments
4 comments add your comment
11 Nov 2010, 5:19 am
