Facebook is the most popular “social media” site on the interwebs. I think it has serious issues, and I have deleted my account.
The New York Review of Books currently contains a thoughtful history of the site, its reasons for growth and its weaknesses. It si written by Charles Peterson of n+1 and is well worth a full read.
The first sign that Facebook might cause trouble came, for many, when a few unexpected members showed up—those who didn’t attend your college, or at least one of the same caliber. Especially for students who had graduated from a public high school and then gone on to an elite private college, the addition of state universities marked a turning point, as former classmates joined the site and started asking to be “friends.” A major attraction of the early Facebook, it was suddenly apparent, came from its snob appeal—the fact that some had been kept out, and only a highly selective few let in.
The mechanics of these “friend requests” are worth describing in some detail. Within a single college, in the early days of the site, everyone could see everything. You “friended” a fellow student not to see her page but to add her name and picture, like a trophy, to your list of friends; this “friend list” then appeared not far from your lists of favorite books and favorite music, more evidence of your discriminating tastes, or proof of your popularity. If a college acquaintance wanted to look at your page, she could simply type in your name—just as she might glance your way on the quad, or eavesdrop on your conversation in the dining hall.
Zuckerberg, however, cordoned off each college from all others. The “friend request” then took on a new function, becoming the means of authorizing people at other schools to see your page. The only way someone at a state university, for instance, could access the page of a student at a private college was by asking to become “friends.” But unlike when a student at a private college might run into an old acquaintance on winter break, it was impossible to politely respond to such a request while giving little away. You had to say yes or no.
Bourdieu, it now appeared, might have been right. When Facebook had been limited to a few elite schools, listing Beethoven among one’s “favorite music” could easily stand as a statement of aesthetic discovery. This was due to that other salutary fiction of an elite meritocratic education: that class distinctions disappear, to be replaced by pure judgment and analytic reason. But beneath the gaze of one’s former classmates, such a claim might well come off as a pose. It was no longer possible to treat the site as an extension of an elite college—the private haunt of one’s “most cultivated” contemporaries.