· Facebook is cheap, it makes words and photos cheap. The easier Facebook makes things, the less value they have, the less story they have, the less any experience is framed and defined by delayed gratification. It is aiding and abetting the cultivation of a generation of impatient consumers, grazing information, dissociating fact from meaning.
· Facebook serves a superficial, sight-seeing mentality. Albums catalogue snapshots of made-for-facebook poses at events that didn’t happen.
· Facebook is Babel, a megaproject that is destroying language.
· Facebook is wilfully ambiguous, it colours everything with its ambiguity: rsvps, affections, inferences.
· Facebook allows you to manufacture identity, and regardless of whether you fabricate illusions, everything must be placed under suspicion – this is not bringing people together.
· Facebook impedes closure and gives the illusion that I can be omnipresent, by never fully leaving a place you are never fully at the next. Your Being is diluted, diffused, spread thin across the globe.
· Facebook is calculated to keep you online looking at their ads. Facebook would rather you conducted all your socialising through their forum, it profits them to keep you inside, plugged in, chatting in 2dimensional space.
· Facebook abuses the human decency that otherwise obliges you to open the door when knocked, answer the phone when rung, help one in need when he asks. It will fatigue human decency by the cacophony of urgent appeals to your patience.
· Facebook is addictive, don’t start. There are the subtle addictions, addictions to affirmation, to busy-ness, to gossip. But further, I have experienced a weight of obligation, unspoken, to be available which in a sense would parallel addiction. This is people-pleasing’s toll in an environment without self-limiting restraint.
· Facebook panders to an idol system I am too weak to resist. The ego I could be, the image I could present - the possibilities are tantalising.
· Facebook takes time I don’t have or want to give. Facebook is a dead end for creative energy. Facebook is a cry for help from a purposeless generation.
· Facebook enables and encourages geographical promiscuity, timelessness and placelessness. I’m not in, of or for a place, I am not submitted to the geography, sunrise, neighbours, politics or any inconvenience of this locale. Facebook is virtual and on a trajectory towards the increasingly unreal.
· Facebook is not enriching my relationships. Facebook is not close enough for intimate relationships and does not give appropriate distance for acquaintances, it blurs what would otherwise be a functional hierarchy of friendships. Facebook ascribes undue importance to superficial relationships and does not offer the potential for real intimacy.
· Facebook trades in a false vulnerability. Those who ‘vomit’ (JimP) themselves online are being done a grave disservice. These are safe places to be vulnerable because people don’t care, and can’t. You are free to imagine they do. (
Jim is online here for those interested, it’s not about facebook per se)
· Facebook is predicated on informationism. As
Schultze describes this quasi-religion which preaches the
is over the
ought,
observation over
intimacy, and
measurement over
meaning.
· Facebook makes our relationships tertiary: there is a middleman, a marketeer, and a cloud of self-congratulating witnesses. All is a performance of who is watching whom in a grand charade of broadcast small-talk.
· Facebook offers more information than you can possibly process.
· Facebook stores your data under dubious Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. If that bothers you..
· Facebook reduces the personhood of a human, their depth and complexity shrink to a face and its attributes. And we become the limited models we employ.
· Facebook gives the illusion of multiplying your availability and denies the limits of the human form, you can chat intimately with five friends on five continents, offering the image of an I-Thou encounter to each, but there is a sense in which you are both suspending disbelief, convincing yourselves that their undivided attention is truly yours.
· Facebook makes me feel good, I get a buzz when you poke me.
· Facebook is primarily an exercise in narcissism, and only secondly a tool for networking. Like hanging a floor to ceiling mirror in the hallway (‘so that the space feels bigger’) – we are inescapably lovers of self, in a group photo you seek yourself out.
· Facebook increases anxiety. Anxiety concerning the system: where your data is, who has your address book, what will the next privacy change bring. And anxiety concerning you and your relationships: who is setting the code for etiquette, am I being understood, should I be more available. You have no excuse not to reply to messages within the hour.
· Facebook allows me to take friends for granted. It reduces the risk of relationship and disincentivises meeting face to face.
· Facebook industrialises friendship to a quantitative process governed by efficiencies.
· Facebook makes of us
second-handers and normalises this empoverishment of a person ((Ayn Rand via JP)
“They don't live from the joy that comes through achieving what they value for its own sake. Instead, they live second-hand from the praise and compliments of others” · Facebook is your life as an OK! Magazine headline. Your 15minutes of celebrity, your name in print, the banal minutiae of your life announced in a 24hour newsculture. This, and reality TV are the models of discourse facebook is made legible through.
· Having written these all, I discover they are largely covered and more succinctly by John Piper in the following single paragraph (in
the full text he tempers this with the positive side which he is erring on in his decision to twitter)
“[social Internet media like blogging, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and others] tend to shorten attention spans, weaken discursive reasoning, lure people away from Scripture and prayer, disembody relationships, feed the fires of narcissism, cater to the craving for attention, fill the world with drivel, shrink the soul’s capacity for greatness, and make us second-handers who comment on life when we ought to be living it. So boycott them and write books (not blogs) about the problem.”· Facebook is unsatisfying, hard to maintain, unsustainable. I have not a home of sufficient weight to keep me from making my home on facebook. I have not done facebook well.
Thanking The Architectural Review for publishing this letter. For the interested, my own efforts at rethinking have been these:
