Facebook creepifies?

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

Was just reading Alex’s post on Facebook creepifies?, and then went to have a look. I’ve always ignored it. Seems like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn are all just examples of form without content technologies that allow people to pretend that they exist.

As one sage and urbane professorial friend put it while we were chatting online:

- never assume anyone on facebook does anything
- fb is about college and stuff
- orkut is about brazillians having sex
- linkedin is about business
- and myspace is about teenagers pretending to be adults pretending to be teenagers who are actually 45 year old women looking for teenagers pretending to be adults… so they can condemn the practice

Of course he’d trash blogs and Livejournal, but for me, and I point to Rochelle for getting this into my head, it is about metaphor and the location of discourse. Blogs locate a narrative on yourself. It is all about you. The others mentioned above are all about pretending you are someone… the location of discourse is ‘elsewhere’, and the metaphor is hype, with a little bit of the simulacra thrown in somewhere. What I find interesting is that there seems to be a relationship between popularity of a technology and its inability to actually DO anything of value. If you have to work at it, express yourself, think about what is important to you and how you want to share it with others, then it is just too much work. If you just have to create a list of personal opinions edited to highlight how you are simultaneously just like everyone else and much cooler than you really are, then the technology is a hit. Hmmm… I wonder why that is?

Transdisciplinary Studies

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

Transdisciplinary Studies
is an internationally oriented book series created to generate new theories and practices to extricate transdisciplinary research from the confining discourses of traditional disciplinarities. Within transdisciplinary domains, this series will publish empirically grounded, theoretically sound work seeking to identify and solve global problems that conventional disciplinary perspectives cannot capture. Transdisciplinary Studies seeks to accentuate those aspects of scholarly research which cut across todays learned disciplines in an effort to define new axiologies and forms of praxis. This series intends to promote a new appreciation for transdisciplinary research to audiences that are seeking ways of understanding complex, global problems that many now realize disciplinary perspectives cannot fully address. Scholars, policy makers, educators and researchers working to address issues in technology studies, public finance, discourse studies, professional ethics, political analysis, learning, ecological systems, modern medicine, and other fields clearly are ready to begin investing in transdisciplinary models of research. It is for those many different audiences in these diverse fields that we hope to reach, not merely with topical research, but also through considering new epistemic and ontological foundations for of transdisciplinary research.

This is a book series that Jeremy and I co-edit. Sounds like trouble.