The recent Facebook uproar makes me question who authorizes such amendments to the page. And is it the same mongoloid who considers my fumbling about Facebook to be “news”? Granted, a profile on Facebook is not mandatory, but neither is the gradual addition of invasive features such as the news feed. It’s as if Facebook is attempting to delegate life, specifically friendship, to its website (Mumford). When friendship is just a click away, we can scrap the “getting-to-know-you” process and dive head first into our new friends’ personal lives. Oddly, Facebookers are hardly reticent to publicize highly personal information and compromising pictures on their profiles. We’re a generation willing to trade our privacy for public exposure, in conjunction with our celebrity obsession and the desire to mimic celebrity culture. Facebook recreates the reluctant voyeurism much like flipping through US Weekly. It’s consistent with a generation unashamed of guilty pleasures. We know something is in poor taste of poor quality, The OC for example, yet we embrace it nonetheless. So even though Facebookers are aware that the new format is insidious and obtrusive, is it just another guilty pleasure? One could argue that this technology follows a constructivist model, wherein the use of a technology depends on social conditions and relations that arise. Facebook knows its members because we have told them everything about us. They modify their site to appeal to us. In a twisted way, Facebook has given us what we want, whether we approve or not: Leering voyeurism into the lives of our peers who take guilty pleasure out of knowing their every move is being documented, like a cyber paparazzi following wannabe celebrities.


Juan Cole on trust in the government: http://www.juancole.com/2006/09/bush-abu-zubayda-and-end-of-trust-bush.html

Apple, those sly dogs: http://www.cjrdaily.org/the_audit/apple_gets_reporters_with_same.php