Recently I decided to renovate myself. I’ve dumped my old blog, my old email, my old contact list and my old calendar. In one way or another, these things were all supplied by my job at RMIT University.
Now I’m freelance (at least in attitude), and I’m radically on the cloud. A lot of it is Google, but some of it, like this blog, aren’t. I’m doing more twittering, more LinkedIn, more Facebook. And because I’ve uploaded myself to Google, a lot of it is now interoperable.
Even the content of my blog has changed – it’s more personal, without being deeply private. It used to be strictly about my teaching, but that’s only a part of it now. I’ve changed my attitude to what I do online, and with that, it would seem I’ve changed myself.
I think it’s good. But who knows? Can I keep up the momentum? But I like it. I like this more poetic me, it seems more honest.
Doing this seems to validate this new me, even if nobody reads it, or nobody knows. All this stuff, all this publishing … on the surface it seems to be about communicating to other people, but maybe that’s not really important.
Oh, did I mention? I’ve got a new business card. It doesn’t say RMIT. The business card is also trying to be interoperable.
Interoperably yours, geniwate.
‘community’ on FB
Facebook has launched a new type of page called a ‘community page’::
We hope Community Pages and your improved profile make it easier for you to learn more about your friends and to express yourself….
Profiles no longer are a static list of likes and interests. Now, they are a living map of all the connections that matter to you.
I’m not sure that this is really about community. It’s about identity, masquerading as community. The collective nature of a community doesn’t have ‘you’ at its centre. It doesn’t exist to serve ‘you’. It is a collectivity of people with enough in common to allow negotiation of common outcomes to be attractive enough to overcome individual interests. I’m also a little suspicious of ‘communities’ that are jump-started in such an overtly manipulative way by some central power, although I’m prepared to concede that sometimes this might work.
The conflation of community and identity is going on a lot in the marketing of social media. Joining the ‘community’ bandwagon – and taking advantage of the under-defined but vaguely positive connotations of this term – makes social media seem more like a social movement, greater than the sum of its parts. Many of these connections are organised programmatically; others are chosen by individuals and in some way result in a hyperlink.
Social media and this example from Facebook in particular have been strongly influenced by Putnam’s vision of social capital, in which community is derived from the confluence of selfish interests. Community thus becomes a sort of accidental, but convenient, offshoot of meeting your own needs.
Sometimes social media does create a community, but it’s driven by people whose exploration and publication of their personal identity comes secondary to the interests of the group. This seems to be the case with the core group on wikipedia (see Clay Shirky’s book, Here comes everybody). I’m not sure Facebook can ever do that, Facebook’s purpose is almost antithetical to community.
