
Design of Facebook Homogenizes Identity and Limits Personal Representation - jkiuu
http://www.hz-journal.org/n19/grosser.html
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A_COMPUTER
People are talking about visual customization, but the article is mostly
talking about how Facebook forces you to conform to social definitions of
yourself by giving you checkboxes for gender, language, forced spellings of
particular concepts, etc.

Foucault talked about (I don't remember where) how technology isn't neutral,
its expressive power is limited by the nature of systematization. and as
technology takes more of a role in daily life, people are forced to conform to
whatever limited system was thrown up that you have to interact with to get
government services or buy groceries. Your life is complicated but the form
gives you four options because a computer can't process your freeform answer.
The article explores how Facebook does this, admits more or less to the
technical and business reasons that underlie this, but then goes ahead and
blames white males anyway. Three years later Facebook has far more options for
languages and genders and naming, which is still limiting, but blows apart the
hegemonic white cis male attitude argument and all you're left with is what
Foucault observed. I don't think you can lump together technical reasons,
business reasons and racial/gender hegemony reasons anyway, but these claims
have currency with some people whether or not the argument for it is
defensible.

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mrxd
Lacan argues that this perception, that there is an inexpressible, ineffable
something which can't be captured by a limited conceptual system, is itself a
product of that system. The male/female binary scheme produces the experience
of being more than simply one or the other.

From this perspective, the best way to support a diversity of self-definitions
is by providing fewer options, not more. Facebook only lets you make one kind
of connection to other people, the "Friend". As a result, two people being
Facebook Friends has many different possible interpretations. No one believes
it means you are friends.

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JeremyMorgan
Didn't read the article, but that's one of the things I like about Facebook
the most. The ability to customize your profile on MySpace is part of what
killed it.

Oh, you already forgot about the flashing animated gifs and snowflakes falling
while 3 different videos and/or songs played?

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acjohnson55
I had the exact same immediate reaction. Facebook was a smash hit in large
part because of how restrictive and uniform it was. Could it not also be said
that Twitter homogenizes communication and limits personal expression?

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troymc
You're right, everyone loves to wear exactly the same clothes in real life. It
only makes sense that they'd want to wear the same "clothes" to express their
online identity. It's obvious in retrospect. Silly MySpace!

~~~
JeremyMorgan
oh people want to express themselves, but when it gets out of control, you get
MySpace. It's not MySpace, it's the people.

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tatterdemalion
There are definitely options between letting you hack falling snowflakes into
your MySpace page and not letting you use any markup at all. A usability-
oriented framework could exist which allows self-expression without all of the
problems of Geocities, MySpace, and tumblr.

But this text isn't strictly about the fact that Facebook doesn't let you
inline CSS and HTML and I think it presents some valid arguments about the
social problems created by Facebook. People should actually read the article.

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EGreg
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity)

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dkarapetyan
It doesn't do any of those things. Behind the scenes facebook has an extremely
rich representation of your identity. In fact it is so good that they could
probably even predict your favorite color and make that the background of your
profile. Would that kind of approach be considered not limiting one's identity
and personal representation?

At the end of the day facebook wants to collect certain kinds of information
to sell to advertisers and the site is set up to do just that. If for some
reason advertisers wanted to know tomorrow if you also self-identify with two
different genders then you'd be damn sure that tomorrow there would be two
gender drop-down lists when you sign up. That is unless they couldn't predict
it from the massive trove of data they already have. So really the argument in
the article comes down to I don't like facebook's UI because it doesn't let me
input the kind of information I want to input all the while forgetting who the
real customer of that data is and that there is this thing called
HTML/CSS/JavaScript that lets you express yourself as freely as you want for
less than $5/month.

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talaketu
"Identity is theft of the self."

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ThomPete
Of course it does and by doing so it allows users to focus on what really
matter which is the content.

Could a more freely customized social network exist? Absolutely but it would
still require some sort of ability to control the powers.

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vernie
Aren't there now around 50 gender choices on Facebook?

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the_cat_kittles
jesus christ- how bout you dont tie up your identity in facebook to begin with

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kuni-toko-tachi
Mainstream academic fluff like this is what is truly homogenized. Academic
articles are a marketplace like any other, and this market tends to promote in
a vehement manner a rather limited worldview.

