On Facebook

I started using Facebook in 2006. Makes it sound like a drug. That makes me a relatively early adapter. I was in Rome, in the middle of a design studio and someone found the site, next thing everyone in the studio was on it. Posting pictures mostly.

The way people use Facebook has changed according to the other technologies available. When it was the only place you could upload pictures for free, that's what it was used for. Then other platforms (simpler to use and tailored for use with cellphone cameras) cane around and that aspect of Facebook faded into the background. Most people I know post the occasional picture of themselves when they are doing something really interesting, or when they are drunk, or to mark an event. Otherwise Facebook became a prototype Twitter.

Facebook has, for years, been my Twitter surrogate. I never understood the use of Twitter. I already have a collected and curated list of friends who get my random thought blasts through status updates, why would I need another platform to reproduce that? Here I was a late adapter. I didn't understand the random thought blast could make people famous - was something you could monetize and get paid for. I still don't use Twitter because my phone isn't made for it.

I bought a phone made by Motorola specifically for the African market. It's incredibly cheap. There's almost no metal in it. And a battery charge lasts forever. In exchange, the screen is as lo tech as a digital clock from 1960. It can only show three letters at a time and you have to scroll endlessly to read anything. Writing on it is next to impossible. But I think it is a beautiful piece of design and I like how cheap it was. I paid $5 for the phone and $20 to have it shipped to me. In retrospect I ought to have bought 3 or 4 just so I felt less like I was being ripped off on the shipping.

So Status Updates have migrated to Twitter. Facebook initially had two things to offer, and here I'm thinking of my reaction to it not what the company claimed it would (or could) do. I liked it because I could post pictures (and see other people's pictures) and make little posts all my friends could read. I still update my status fairly regularly - it is a medium I'm comfortable with. Updating my status hs become a form of mental exercise - work a joke into something people will read and maybe think about. It requires about 1/50th the commitment reading any of these posts does. But most of my friends haven't updated their status in months - they use Twitter for that.

Facebook has become a great aggregator. The greatest. Sites like Huffington Post, Geekologie, and the Cheezburger Network are strictly about aggregation; they collect things from all over the web and repost it. They create almost no new content. See this from Bruce Sterling for an idea of who is creating for the net and who is just reposting. I probably shouldn't have said "just reposting", In the same way creating a mix-tape was the simplest (but highly refined) act of creation a kid of my generation could accomplish, reposting is a similar kind of creation through recontextualization.

And I should also add, my friend Emily is better at this than anyone I know. Which is something I wouldn't be able to say if there wasn't any creation, any addition of personality, taking place in the process.

Facebook, like the internet as a whole, has moved into a new phase. Maybe this is only true for people like myself - people who can only navigate it by following trails laid down by others. I cannot say what the internet is to those able to recreate it any way they want. But, to return to my point, the internet has entered a phase where curation is more important than collection. No one cares how many GB or TB your site has of something. Remember when that was the pitch, "50TB of pure Sports Action!!!" Now it is all about separating the wheat from the chaff.

Why Facebook is still interesting to me is all my friends get together to act as a collection of curators. I think it would be interesting to have a running list (with links intact) of all the things my friends collected from the net. I don't have the technological savvy to do that but wish I did. 80% would be about architecture. The other 20% would be the interesting part. And, despite the internet law of averages, none of it is pr0n or videos of cats or babies.