It's old hat to say that Facebook has replaced Blogger and Twitter has replaced Facebook. The latter replacement surely has to do with the prevalence of mobile devices (and the difficulty of "typing" on them), esp. among young people. But what about the former? Both blogs and FB are mostly old farts like me.
If Twitter is also about reduced attention spans, perhaps FB is about reduced patience and time. People post and respond to posts more frequently, because it doesn't take as long - or at least you're not expected to be as smart and eloquent (or prolix). By the same token, one can "keep up with" more people in less time; if Blogger is like a virtual public sphere, FB is a virtual cocktail party (emphasis on "virtual," in both cases).
There are some folks who have done good things with "microblogging" on FB. Ben Friedlander is the first person who comes to mind - pithy posts arising directly from his research and thinking about poetics; the responses tend to be equally good. Sure, it's like overhearing snippets of conversation, but a really good conversation.
The rest of us just make wise-cracks.
In one respect, FB is head-and-shoulders above Blogger: you can SEE the comments to the original post (well, several, anyway). It's like a digest of bulletin boards delivered to your computer. So the dialogic aspect is always in front of your face - unlike Blogger, which seems to think the Comments are the Footnotes. (In Word Press, you can make the comments part of the "main page" of the blog - but the print is so damn tiny!).
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4 comments:
I like Laura Mullen's use of facebook for BP oil spill news and advocacy. There are other folks doing political work on facebook. And the jokes are sometimes good, too.
I think Facebook has a higher incidence of phatic communication than blogger, and I don't mean that as criticism. It's not that people don't post things on Facebook conveying actual information, but Facebook seems more tribe-building, in the way the "what are you doing? I'm going to class. Oh, me too" kind of cellphone conversations are. Even witty, articulate people seem to be primarily engaging in phatic communication on Facebook.
Somehow meditations on topics seem more appropriate on blogger than they do on Facebook. I'm not sure why that is, but maybe it's because of the potential for everything on Facebook to show up in the feed, whereas users of Blogger have to seek out the site. Actually, you could subscribe to RSS feeds with blogs, so I guess that theory doesn't hold.
I find myself thinking about 50% of the time, though, that all communication on the internet is motivated by terror of silence.
Thanks for posting this Joe. It has gotten me thinking about these topics.
Facebook for me is like sitting around at the coffee shop, and also listening to my own version of CNN. I can cover a variety of subjects and hear a variety of opinions on them in a very short time. Whether this is good or bad for me is up for debate.
If I used Blogger the way it could be used, it would be more like a virtual salon conversation among people with deep interest in the subject at hand, but that doesn't seem to happen. My own interest in using it is more visual than literary.
I know that my own level of patience has been affected by the use of these social media, and can only assume that's true for others as well. I try to bring some level of nuance back to the discourse sometimes but rarely stick around to see the effect, so...
You're welcome, Ben. So, phatic but not PHAT.
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