Sunday, January 20, 2008
Nestled back in my jaunty electric boudoir. I have decided to come back to this blog. For some months following the Vagina Luv wet-newspaper fight (thok! thok!), I just couldn't be fucked defending my opinions to some Princeton palaeofeminist, so I crept into the warmth of Facebook, where my Notes became ersatz blog posts.
In one way Facebook has made me feel more secure about what I write, in that I can control exactly who reads my notes there. But on the other hand, I was getting maybe 100 visitors a day to this blog, who may or may not know me but needed to seek my blog out in order to read it, whereas my Facebook notes have potentially around 300 viewers, who get notifications about each note regardless of how well they know me.
I am also keen to avoid hosting my intellectual property with Facebook. But let's get something clear. I don't subscribe to the stoopid conspiracy theories and sooking about how Facebook is run by evil right-wing neocons, used as a CIA surveillance tool, and dominated by intrusive advertising and inane applications. I think that, used judiciously (rather than with a sense of helplessness and bewilderment: "these applications just kept sending me stuff and I didn't want to get that stuff so I deleted my Facebook account!"), Facebook is great and I will continue to use it until my networks move elsewhere.
Even though I am uneasy about Web 2.0's tendency to commodify intellectual property, pretty much every kind of successful online community is run on these capitalistic terms nowadays, and I think the benefits (for me) of being able to archive files and ideas online outweighs the cost of doing that in privately owned public space. Even though I recognise that Blogger is probably just as 'bad' as Facebook (ideologically speaking), at least it is an outward-looking interface compared to the gated community of Facebook, and at least it is a single-purpose interface that enables blogging and nothing more, forcing you to create your own online community through your commenting practices and blogroll, rather than plug it into an existing framework.
I know I will need to be on my best behaviour here, and aside from pseudo-independence, that discipline is probably becoming more attractive to me than the urge to communicate my ideas to others, which was always my primary motivation for blogging. So, until I can be bothered registering a domain name and wrangling with Wordpress or such, I am back here. So you can all suck it.
In one way Facebook has made me feel more secure about what I write, in that I can control exactly who reads my notes there. But on the other hand, I was getting maybe 100 visitors a day to this blog, who may or may not know me but needed to seek my blog out in order to read it, whereas my Facebook notes have potentially around 300 viewers, who get notifications about each note regardless of how well they know me.
I am also keen to avoid hosting my intellectual property with Facebook. But let's get something clear. I don't subscribe to the stoopid conspiracy theories and sooking about how Facebook is run by evil right-wing neocons, used as a CIA surveillance tool, and dominated by intrusive advertising and inane applications. I think that, used judiciously (rather than with a sense of helplessness and bewilderment: "these applications just kept sending me stuff and I didn't want to get that stuff so I deleted my Facebook account!"), Facebook is great and I will continue to use it until my networks move elsewhere.
Even though I am uneasy about Web 2.0's tendency to commodify intellectual property, pretty much every kind of successful online community is run on these capitalistic terms nowadays, and I think the benefits (for me) of being able to archive files and ideas online outweighs the cost of doing that in privately owned public space. Even though I recognise that Blogger is probably just as 'bad' as Facebook (ideologically speaking), at least it is an outward-looking interface compared to the gated community of Facebook, and at least it is a single-purpose interface that enables blogging and nothing more, forcing you to create your own online community through your commenting practices and blogroll, rather than plug it into an existing framework.
I know I will need to be on my best behaviour here, and aside from pseudo-independence, that discipline is probably becoming more attractive to me than the urge to communicate my ideas to others, which was always my primary motivation for blogging. So, until I can be bothered registering a domain name and wrangling with Wordpress or such, I am back here. So you can all suck it.
