everyone's life looks good from their facebook profile
Amid my growing concern for the security of my facebook profile, I have been removing data from my account (I know facebook still has the data, but it's the best I can do). I can't quite bear to leave the fold yet - I'll wait for the site's inevitable demise among my friends to do that.
However it was quite a wrench to get rid of all those carefully crafted lists and quotations, designed to be the perfect marketing tool to communicate my values, tastes, and the sense of wry ironic humour that is the essential ingredient of every social network profile.
It got me thinking about one of the core appeals of this type of community - the total control it gives you over how you appear to others. The internet can be a scary, uncontrollable place, but facebook feels like an oasis of perfectibility.
It got me thinking about one of the core appeals of this type of community - the total control it gives you over how you appear to others. The internet can be a scary, uncontrollable place, but facebook feels like an oasis of perfectibility.
No more having to show friends embarrassing holiday snaps of you looking flabby and sunburned after too many sangrias; instead a carefully selected gallery of your most flattering pictures, backed up by a profile pic taken in the classic myspace pose, with wide doe eyes, multiple chins eliminated, and hips minimised through the magical power of perspective.
Hate your job? Well, just leave that space blank, or describe it in a way that makes it sound like a dream come true:"I'm an intern at a large independent TV production company" - translation: I work unpaid making tea for arseholes.
It's even easier when it comes to listing your favourite books and films. How about Amelie? Given it's box office takings, it's a remarkably popular choice, and no wonder; who wouldn't want to be associated with its kooky sweetness. The intellectual associations of it being a French film are an added bonus, of course.
The thing is, that everyone knows that these online networks of beautiful, successful, interesting people are a fiction. And the same reasons that we find it so useful in crafting our own image, make it completely useless in finding out anything real about anyone else. You like the Garden State? So what? I've learned nothing about you apart from the fact you are versed in the art of self-promotion.
I do think the death knell for facebook will come in the form of massive security breaches or privacy scandals, but I also think that people will start to realise that it doesn't reflect reality as perfectly as we first thought. We can only truly understand people if we know them flaws and all.
kate s-b
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4 comments:
Amélie is to French films what Merchant-Ivory is to British ones. It's sooooo French, almost hyperFrench, that it sort of falls over the other side into a mythical land where people in stripy jumpers sell onions and play accordions and smoke Gitanes and have affairs all at the same time. The overall effect is like eating 43 profiteroles at once.
Er, yes, anyway. Nice blog. Keep it up. But Delicatessen is much, much better, of course.
I guess that's why it became such an international success - it embodies a French-ness that everyone can be comfortable with. Food and Sex: who wouldn't want to be associated with that!
Amélie has absolutely nothing in common with the France that I know, but it is one of my favourite films, because of the colours.
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