This is a response to a recent Guardian article called With Friends Like Facebook...


Tom Hodgkinson hates Facebook. That much I believe, though I have trouble understanding exactly why, or more importantly, what he really proposes his readers ought to do about its nascent dangers to civilization.

Hodgkinson begins his piece with the 'gloomy image' of a friend who recently spent a Saturday night with Facebook, drinking at his desk. It’s not the drinking that bothers Hodgkinson (who advocates the pub over the computer), but what he perceives as the loneliness of the situation. This raises the question: would Hodgkinson object if his friend were to throw back a few pints while making phone calls? That’s another behavior that seems as if it is being done alone, when viewed from the outside.

One thing that makes Facebook different from the telephone is that it permits users to post flattering pictures, some of which permit an "artificial representation" designed to get sex or approval, argues Hodgkinson. Leaving aside that this sounds like a good description of Guardian personal ads, one wonders how Hodgkinson reconciles the 'loneliness' of Facebook with the fact that his friend used it to find someone for a shag (I’m assuming it was an offline one.)

Moving from the personal to the political, Hodgkinson follows the money behind Facebook, demonstrating how this purportedly democratic medium is actually dominated by libertarian wack jobs. Here, he is late to the show. As the military was to Arpanet, so have conservatives been to the Web, almost from its inception. Am I the only one old enough to remember how early issues of Wired featured economic advisors to Ronald Reagan in their pages?


Seemingly unaware that writers have been discussing VC’s 'California Ideology' for more than twenty years, Hodgkinson tells us what his real problem is: "On Facebook, you can be free to be who you want to be, as long as you don't mind being bombarded by adverts for the world's biggest brands."

Really?

Does anyone under the age of forty believe you can be 'anything you want to be' on the Web? Does anyone of any age believe any social spaces exist free of ads? Has Hodgkinson ever used Google, which also matches his preferences to advertised products, and doesn’t have a 'community' to even voice opposition to its practices?

"Clearly," writes Hodgkinson, "Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them?"

Here I am baffled. I thought Hodgkinson's point all along was that Facebook users weren’t friends (like those down at the pub friends whom you drink with and remember so well the next day) but rather consumers. If this is the case, why should Facebook's uber-capitalism operate differently than that of any other commercial entity?

In the same vein, I don't understand the upset over globalized communications. After all, the same nation-free Web that runs Facebook is the one that allows me to see Hodgkinson's article in rural Florida. Isn't that okay? When he warns that Facebook presents an “ideologically motivated virtual totalitarian regime with a population that will very soon exceed the UK's,” I begin worrying over this reporter’s mental state.

Virtual.totalitarian.regime.

“Facebook is profoundly uncreative,” argues Hodgkinson. “It makes nothing at all.” While one might take issue with the idea that Facebook users don’t make anything (what are all those ancillary applications I keep getting notices about?) I understand the sentiment. Facebook is all connection. There's no there there.

Yet is the commercialized commaraderie of Facebook really all that different from Hodgkinson’s beloved local? The next time you walk into what seems to be a time-worn yet slightly hip pub in London, check to see if all the silverware is gathered in a bucket on the table with a rolled up bar menu inside. If it is, you've wandered into one of the deliberately 'unbranded' establishments of restaurant and bar giant Mitchell’s and Butler. While you have a pint and bemoan the state of the internet (or locally owned pubs), go ahead and excuse yourself to use the bathroom. Inside of five minutes, you’ll be staring at advertising in what used to be the most non-commercial of spaces: the toilets.

I suppose my point in all this is that the invasion of global capital into formerly private domains is hardly specific to virtual systems like Facebook. Like Hodgkinson, I worry about Facebook’s data mining and its proprietary structure, but to be honest, I worry more about Google’s helpful offer to control all the digital copies of books in the world. The main difference between Hodgkinson’s position and mine is that I don’t think a trip off the grid is the way out.

Near the end of his article, Hodgkinson mentions philosopher René Girard. One of Girard’s specialties is mimesis: the theory of imitation. Hodgkinson chooses to understand mimesis as 'herd mentality.' I prefer to remember Aristotle’s treatment of mimesis.

In the Poetics, Aristotle takes on Plato’s desire to toss all performers out of the Republic for being dangerous dissemblers. Too virtual, we’d say today. To temper Plato, Aristotle distinguishes between two forms of imitation. The first--mimicry--constitutes a poor form of imitation; the kind Plato felt harmed the Republic, and the kind Hodgkinson links to locales like Facebook. The other form of imitation--mimesis--Aristotle saw as an often unexpected act in which the imitator stumbles on something larger than him or herself, and notices “art, beauty, love, pleasure and truth,” as Hodgkinson would put it.

As someone who studies social networks, I can attest that one needn’t run to Keats’s Endymion to find the mimetic impulse. Like a flower growing from a dung heap, it flourishes in the strangest locales. The trick Internet ethnographers have learned (and I wish a few reporters could pick up) is to remember that one wants to find a rose in shit, it's best to stop focusing on smell and start looking for color, wherever one is.