More on Facebook: Community Becomes Mass Culture
I continue to find compelling both the Facebook fiasco of last week and the astonishing timing of the reputed Yahoo offer… just when Facebook loses, ah, face. And I’m still puzzling over why so many of the Facebook users cyber-picketed News Feed and Mini Feed. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Danah Boyd has some smart things to say about privacy and control, but I’m still fussing let’s so go at this from a different perspective.
The Facebook user revolt has to do with the nature of mass culture.
Elsewhere, I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about how to define mass culture without resorting to descriptions of specific technology or any quantitative gestures (over 1,000 audience members, 10,000 audience, et cetera) because ultimately the difference between mass culture and intimate or artisinal culture is cognitive rather than formal or technical.
Intimate culture is communicative: there is a back and forth feedback loop between the creator of culture (or art) and the audience. It’s the difference between the manager of a corporate department or a teacher at the end of the semester talking and making in-jokes to the members of a community (jokes that baffle newcomers or guests) and the jokes a standup comedian makes on The Tonight Show.
In mass culture, the creator turns over control over what the culture or art means to the audience. What something means in a cultural sense splits into, on one hand, the old-fashioned public debate about how something resonates with its cultural moment (think the difference between “Dynasty” and “Desperate Housewives” or the difference between the original “Brady Bunch” TV series and the later movie version), and on the other hand the individuated mass culture question of “what this art means to ME.”
To put it simply, people DO STUFF to the products of mass culture– whether invisibly in their minds and how they incorporate mass culture into their lives and identities or visibly in the identity markers they wear (tattoos, branded tee-shirts) or the culture they create based on mass culture products. Our digital age has made this “doing stuff” practice more visible than ever before in human history since we now have a mashup environment where ordinary folks with out-of-the-box Macs or cheap software can combine, remix and alter the products of culture at whim.
Intimate or artisinal culture asks, “what do you think of this?” and expects a response.
Mass culture says, “here are some building blocks; go build something with them… even if its only in your own head.” No response is expected.
So what does this have to do with Facebook?
In one gesture, News Feed and Mini Feed transformed the identity products (my page, my posts, my friends) of Facebook users from intimate culture to mass culture. Faux-intimate communications among friends (I’ve put something on my wall for my 367 closests friends to come and see) suddenly became distributed, suddenly became building blocks where the page-owner couldn’t see what was being built. News Feed and Mini Feed said, “Here’s a part of my identity: go do something with it… and don’t let me know.”
The problem is that Facebook didn’t ask its users if it was OK to turn them into mass culture products. It just did it.
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